Port Hope
Dedicated to my Father, Lawrence H. Peters, who taught me the love of reading.
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”
― T.S. Eliot |
Port Hope is an installation piece, mixed media, incorporating three elements in its construction. It began in 2009 when I was looking for an object to be a vehicle for writing words on–that I could make many of in clay. I wanted something absolutely ordinary, like a rear view mirror, but that had a life of its own. I worked on that for a long time, with the vision of making a few hundred.
Then I began looking for something that the objects could be in context to–something that would go behind them. I wasn’t sure what, and I suddenly saw it one day when I was on a road trip with my parents. The “Port Hope” sign. During this time, for many months, I was making the rear view mirrors. I had thought I would inscribe the mirrors with book titles that could also be like phrases of little wisdoms or could become Haikus when read in a random fashion. I especially wanted to make something in honor to my father, who, in my memory, never was without a book to read. |
NARRATIVE ELEMENTS
1. Port Hope
Road sign for the town of Port Hope, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River, Highway of Heroes, #401.
I have driven on this road a thousand times but saw the sign for the first time in June 2011.
When is a sign a sign? When we are ready to see it?
This sign might have been in the film “It Happened One Night”, a screwball comedy made in 1934, at the height of the depression, between the great wars. No irony, just plain old hope. “Port Hope”, is the idea of an old-fashioned place where you believed in the future and in the past, too; where history and tradition and hope could stay knit together. A place where innocence is possible, and disappointment does not wear you out. A place with a little bit of Hollywood romance for your soul.
2. Rear view mirrors
A commonplace object, ubiquitous, functional, and unremarkable, but an object that has connections to our car-culture of constant movement and frequent migrations, a recent and very American 20C way of living. A familiar symbol, the rear view mirror is also metaphorically loaded, a tongue-in-cheek reminder of how we often live our lives in reverse, but also of the interconnections of past, present and future.
3. Book Titles
We are what we read.
The books engraved in “Port Hope” are not the classics, or the best books ever written, or the most important books or all the books I’ve read or all the books you should read. They are only a fraction of what has made me and what could make you. But if you read them, they will make a difference, and you cannot know otherwise until you do.
Road sign for the town of Port Hope, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River, Highway of Heroes, #401.
I have driven on this road a thousand times but saw the sign for the first time in June 2011.
When is a sign a sign? When we are ready to see it?
This sign might have been in the film “It Happened One Night”, a screwball comedy made in 1934, at the height of the depression, between the great wars. No irony, just plain old hope. “Port Hope”, is the idea of an old-fashioned place where you believed in the future and in the past, too; where history and tradition and hope could stay knit together. A place where innocence is possible, and disappointment does not wear you out. A place with a little bit of Hollywood romance for your soul.
2. Rear view mirrors
A commonplace object, ubiquitous, functional, and unremarkable, but an object that has connections to our car-culture of constant movement and frequent migrations, a recent and very American 20C way of living. A familiar symbol, the rear view mirror is also metaphorically loaded, a tongue-in-cheek reminder of how we often live our lives in reverse, but also of the interconnections of past, present and future.
3. Book Titles
We are what we read.
The books engraved in “Port Hope” are not the classics, or the best books ever written, or the most important books or all the books I’ve read or all the books you should read. They are only a fraction of what has made me and what could make you. But if you read them, they will make a difference, and you cannot know otherwise until you do.
