When I was little, I noticed there were random objects which remained in corners of rooms in my parents’ homes, collecting dust, unused, only to be touched in special circumstances, and then only reverently and respectfully. This was interesting to me, in part because these objects were rather commonplace.
For years I thought about creating an art project in which I would use these objects. A few years ago, I noticed a set of wooden bocce balls that were worn, cracked, and warped. They had become more ovoid than circular and no longer useable in the game. Their color and the hand-crafted nature of the bocce balls were appealing to me, as was the story of how they ended up in a wire basket beside my neighbors’ garage. I asked my neighbor to tell me the story of the bocce balls. He said that a local widow gave the set to him because they hadn’t been used in years. I asked if I could have them if he wasn’t going to use them. He excitedly gave them to me.
I thought of ways to create an art project including the bocce balls. At one point, I considered cutting them in half, but I decided against that idea because it was important to me that they remain in tact. The slow, unpredictable alterations made by time and change were important to me. Then, I started to think about other items like this set of bocce balls that were always around during my childhood. I thought about the different items that we keep, how we have an attachment to them because of what they are, or because of who owned them years before, and how their stories are important to us, although their usefulness is perhaps unclear.
The first object I wanted to include after the bocce balls was my father’s little league Mickey Mantle model Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Slugger wood baseball bat. I asked my dad if he could remember when he got this bat. He faintly smiled, and a gleam was in his eyes. “I was around 10 or 12, I suppose. So, 1959 or 1960,” he told me. The bat is an important object that we have kept for years. It’s avoided animals and floods that could have damaged it while it leaned alone in whatever dark, forgotten corner it was placed. Like everything humans create, no matter how safely it is stored, an object cannot avoid time. It, like us, is part of the universe. It is wrapped in my father’s memory, and, as his curious child, now, mine. Now, as part of this project, it is sheathed in a web of reclaimed fabric, constructed by me.
The next item is my mother’s Mary Hardwick wooden Wilson tennis racket from the 1960s.
The third item is my mother’s majorette baton from the 1950s.
The next item is my brother’s dart board from the 1980s.
The next item is my sister’s skateboard from the 1990s.
The seventh item is a 2010 Adidas soccer ball and one of a pair of indoor Adidas Beckenbauer Goal soccer shoes that were my brother’s.
