SOPHIA LEE

project 2011~

collaborating, curated & collecting

i’ve always been fascinated by the idea of waste. things that r man-made had its uses n then tossed out. the flyers that we c floating around like trash after its past its usefulness. the candy wrapper that once wrapped around the precious sweetness is now a pc of trash for the landfill. i’ve done installation pcs where my partner n i collected discarded leaves from all over town, but in the end, it’s also tossed back into the landfill when the install was over.
in 2006, i was living in taipei at the time, i noticed that these white cottony things were flying all over my neighborhood. it turned out, they exploded from the tree pods nearby, carrying within the cotton r the seeds from the tree. i stopped my bike n began collecting them, running thru traffic of scooters, bikes, pedestrians. it was a full bag of tree lint that i had collected over the next few days. the original plan was to keep the lint n place it inside a shadow box frame. i sorted out all the seeds from the lint but it wasn’t until 2010 that i actually did something with these tree lints.

this past couple of yrs, i’ve picked up all kinds of seed pods from all sorts of plants. in urban setting, these seeds that carries the hope and dreams of nature became part of the human waste. this spring, i began collecting them in large quantities, not knowing what i was to do with them. then, i realized, my painted lines and the pods make perfect partners. i hope by collecting the seed pods, i can share with the viewers their beauty n ingenious methods of transporting themselves.

Pods: the curated arabesque

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