Elizabeth Ware Perkins

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work deals with southern mystique, family traditions and stories passed down from seven generations of hard working and loving farming folk. My works are like the children of childhood sweethearts that eloped after falling in love at the Virginia State Fair sometime between 1930 and 1950. Their daughter, an old maid, knits and tats in a rocker at a sunny window of a farmhouse while watching birds feed and nest. They are kin folk and southern rural community. They are children who ride down the dusty road on a horse to go visiting with the old widowed woman who tells stories. They participate in barn raisings, hog slaughters, quilting-bees, bake-ins, and revivals. They live by old wives tales, farm by the moon, and go out of their way not to break superstition. They leave to their children bizarre family traditions, and wonderful recipes like great-great aunt Lessie's Lemon pie. They are heirlooms; sorting of abandoned buildings of treasure, history, and rural Americana. They are infested with bugs and varmints, things hand-made, a wooden box filled with old mule skin work gloves, and the silver stashed under the bed for safekeeping.

I am a great-great-granddaughter and artist that fuses these characters, places, and sentiments with new, fantastic, hand-made glass objects. These things come together like all the smells from a kitchen, both to feast and rest in the gallery. The material and subject matter preserve and show the deterioration of my southern upbringing where the orange walled tires splash the rich red mud onto contemporary consciousness. The work is dug from an honest and personal field that keeps in mind a larger landscape in relationship to my heritage.