Annie Arrasmith: “Bits and Pieces”

When I was young, I lived in camps all up and down the Mississippi River as my dad followed the work on the levees. For play I made things out of what was at hand: sticks & stones & dirt. I can remember drawing whole worlds in the dirt out in the woods and then populating those worlds with little magical totems made of twigs & bark & moss & cicada shells, or making mobiles out of sticks & string & old lipton tea bags, and hanging them in the trees and leaving them.

In this current body of work, I’m still playing with what’s at hand: clay & ground earths & sticks & ceramic ‘stones.’ By ignoring narrative and presenting these odd bits and pieces of things in a formal way, I‘m asking you to slow down and attend to them for a moment: to be with this piece of old wood or that chunk of molded clay, and to see how beautiful they are in their odd imperfection.

To me these elements are like musical notes: I play & arrange & rearrange them until I feel a sense of satisfaction with the work as a whole; a sound or a note or a song I feel in my body—one that says, in the words of the great British actor Dame Maggie Smith:

“Yummy, yummy, yummy.”