FLOW.14: Jessica Sanders

The Project: Ground

To install Ground, Sanders will create ten sculpted earth chairs, in a variety of forms, within sight of one another along the coastline of Randall’s Island Park. The chairs will be bound by Kentucky Bluegrass, chosen for its suitability to the Island’s ground and climate as well as for its balance of softness and durability. The installation will offer an unmitigated phenomenological experience, the opportunity to interact with a living material in a simultaneously nostalgic and atypical way. The variety of forms will offer places for contemplation, play and community: a solitary quiet seat; a pair of low and intimate conversational chairs; long chairs to lounge upon; and stump stools in a line by the coast, places to sit and fish or consider the ocean. Sited along the river, the sloping grassy curves will invite all the senses, and will juxtapose the ephemeral nature of land with the steel and concrete of Manhattan just across the river. Ground will change with time and use, showing areas of wear, a mark and history of what came before, yet will continue to grow and to replenish itself – providing a place for New Yorkers to connect with the physicality of nature.

The Artist: Jessica Sanders

Jessica Sanders makes sculpture, installations, and paintings that investigate interactions through the filter of materials and physicality, focusing on matter which has an immediacy – wax, sugar, salt, clay, honey, hair, mud. Her work carries a haptic corporeality, incorporating tactile elements with process, looking for moments of shift and change. She studied at the University of Miami (BFA, 2007) and the Ohio State University (MFA, 2010).