Henny Burnett: I am a mixed media artist working mainly in sculpture and installation using a range of techniques that include casting, assemblage, photography, projections & sound. My practice is about the domestic and every day, and the stories of the objects around us – in both our homes and museums. Collecting, collating, documenting and display are key elements in my work as is repetition. I am interested in the dynamics of opposites: domestic and industrial, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, temporary or permanent. My process has resulted in work that explores the fragility of memory; is rooted in the fabric of the home, yet presented in a historical context.
365 Days of Plastic (2020-2021) – (short version)
365 Days of Plastic is an installation and sculpture that is cast in pink dental plaster. It demonstrates one year’s worth of plastic food packaging from a single household, which is both simultaneously beautiful and horrific. This is a disturbing view of one typical family’s environmental impact. The work plays with the ambiguity of outcome and interpretation – domestic and industrial, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless.
Cast dental plaster. 3 m x 4 m.
https://www.axisweb.org/p/hennyburnett/
https://www.instagram.com/hennyburnett/
Snow Baby
by Sarah Freligh
Her girl is disappearing, erased daily by the wan heat of a January sun. Her cold only child, the daughter she palmed into life out of snow and hope after the others were wrung out of her, little white dishrags. Afterward, the white space where she’d been stranded. Every day a blizzard in her brain, a windowless room until she flexed her fingers and built her girl. Please come inside, her husband begs her nightly. But no, not yet. Here is a pink hat, daughter. Can you see how I’m trying to save you?
Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cincinnati Review and in the anthology New Microfiction: Exceptionally Short Stories (W.W. Norton, 2018). She was the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009.From MER 17 (2019). Marjorie Tesser, Editor-in-Chief.
