No Place Like Home
2019
Marian Shapiro
Glenbrook, NSW, Australia
38 x 55 x 4 centimeters
marble, unglazed ceramic, tiny plastic people, hand made copper wire mesh, oxides
not for sale
In the early 1900s my great grandparents fled Lithuania with their young children. They were lucky and found asylum. Generations later, I live in a country I didnāt grown up in and I grew up in a country my parents immigrated to. Thereās always a sense of impermanence hovering in the background.
Over a century later, the story continues. Many millions of people are a lot less lucky than my grandparents and are currently in flight all over the world. Fleeing from repressive regimes and in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Of course the situation at the moment has been greatly exacerbated by the global pandemic with some people being forced to move āback homeā and others in internal flight, sheltering in place.
The visual starting point for this piece was old, stained and crumpled maps and the memories inherent in torn and discarded documents and paper. These human tragedies have been with us for millennia and continue into the present. My mix of ancient and modern materials and techniques reflects this. Hand cut marble, cleaved with the same tools used by the Romans and Greeks is used in conjunction with modern materials such as plastic and wire.