Shana MacDonald

Dear Ruth: Negotiating the private everyday in public art

This paper addresses questions of the public and the private raised by my recent collaborative installation Dear Ruth (October 2009). The piece, co-created with artist Angela Joosse, was part of The Leona Drive Project (www.leonadraive.ca), a public artist intervention situated in six abandoned bungalows in a Toronto suburb. Dear Ruth, a site-specific installation located in the kitchen of 9 Leona Drive, worked with found everyday objects, including old photographs, recipes and childhood autograph books, of Ruth Gillespie, the house’s primary inhabitant for over forty years. We transformed these objects into a series of photo-based sculptures and video installations that inhabited the kitchen’s interior spaces — the cupboards, the drawers and inside the stove. Through repetition and various forms of framing we displayed Ruth’s belongings as a visual archive of her lived experience within the context of her personal kitchen.

The performative process of re-inhabiting Ruth’s kitchen with her belongings, including a video documenting us cooking a meal with her recipes, produced a hybrid public/private space that highlighted the aesthetic tensions between the intimacy and interiority of the domestic space and the very public context of the larger exhibition. Through the constellation between domestic space, the archive and found objects, our installation addressed questions of presence and absence in art. The affective experience of nostalgia, memory and loss experienced in the construction of this piece will be considered in relation to the public responses to such nostalgia and mourning in the installation.