Ship of Fools

Created for the Venice Vending Machine 9, 2019.

Amulets are meant to protect and amplify wishes and desires. While these amulets, at first unwrapping, seem another plea for wealth, they are in fact agents of dissatisfaction.

“When my boat comes in” is an old American adage for hopes of wealth. These boats, made of a counterfeit ten-dollar bill, symbolize the questionable value of such a wish. Inside each boat is a small scroll containing writing critical of the free market system. The origami umbrella with threads is a reminder that markets don’t guarantee freedom, as the Hong Kong protestors involved in the Umbrella Movement since 2014, have found out.

Another winter looms. Will the free market warm the children living in substandard housing with little heat? Will it feed the elderly who have spent lifetimes in labor and child-rearing? Will it comfort traumatized veterans who have fought to keep their countries stable, safe, and prosperous?

Kaishi Silent Boats

Created for the Venice Vending Machine Tate Liverpool ED Vll, 2018 Each boat contains a scroll with kanji characters for silent wrapped in sea blue cloth. The boat and scroll are tied with silk thread, wound 18 (1_8) times around them. All materials are made in Japan. Origami boats recur in my work. These ten speak to the silences I experience in my life in Japan, silences due to lack of language fluency and a naturally solitary nature.

All ten boats are made from kaishi, a Japanese paper dating from the Heian period (794-1185年). still used when eating, for cleaning one’s fingers, dabbing the face or taking notes. This particular paper is used in the tea ceremony, as a sweets plate, for wiping the rim of the tea bowl and, perhaps, for poems. The paper I chose is made specifically to be used by women. It’s important for me to produce work referencing cross-cultural experiences, events and simple everyday tasks.

Economic need and personal inclination have driven me to live between continents and cultures, never quite at home in one or the other. These canoes are amulets really, symbolically mobile “refugia”, simple objects made from women’s materials of one culture by a migratory women from another.

Sea Amulets

created for the Venice Vending Machine ED V, 58th Venice Biennale 2017. These are 2 6 x 2 cms artist multiples, containing :

(1) adventurine and turquoise chips, hardened sand (Sagami Bay, Japan), a copper gilded false indigo pod, a copper gilded origami canoe, all wrapped in a cyanotype upon which the Ave Maria is written in Seychellois Creole (Seselwa)

(2) adventurine and turquoise chips, a timeworn shell remnant , a copper gilded false indigo pod, a copper gilded origami canoe, wrapped in a cyanotype upon which the Ave Maria is written in Seychellois Creole (Seselwa)

The artist hopes that these amulets protect what inspires and sustains the imagination of those who live near water.

r e f u g e

Created for the Venice Vending Machine ED. III, installed at the 56th Venice Biennale, this multiple addresses the 2015 summer crisis crossings on the Mediterranean sea. The number 1,867 is the United Nations Refugee Council's death count for Mediterranean boat crossings, January through June 2015.

r e f u g i a

The copper-leafed paper origami boats represent journey and remembrance, water and loss. The boat is accompanied by a scroll, placed within the boat, a print of starlike water light, in a “wine-dark” sea. On the scroll is a number, the total number of refugees who have died this year, from January to June, trying to cross the Mediterranean. The number who have died in 2015 is now over 2,000.

To seek refuge, to desire to thrive, is a core human impulse. What if we acknowledged that impulse as what unites, rather than divides, us?

© 2015 - 2025 marsha mcdonald