Life Jacket

Title: Life Jacket
Place/Time: Seaview, Washington on the Long Beach Peninsula, November 2015 (Test runs, project studies, on the beach in Lincoln City, Oregon and the beach in Seaview, Washington.)

Size: 24″ long x 15″ wide x 4″
Materials: fabric/canvas from discarded beach-lounge-chairs, roadside-found straps,  (all materials selected for their specific and inherent story of place relevant to the concepts within this work)

Details (condensed):
Living in an area of tsunami test sirens and evacuation routes, I wondered what it would feel like to make my own life jacket. Within Lifejacket I try to provide safety for myself in a place in which the threat of danger persists through any efforts.

Details (expanded):
Living in an area of tsunami test sirens and evacuation routes, I wondered what it would feel like to make my own life jacket. Within Lifejacket I try to provide safety for myself in a place in which the threat of danger persists through any efforts. The process of sewing Life Jacket felt so very strange, a life-saving device, yet sewn in with every stitch was a sense of futileness. After all, how much good can a life jacket do in the earthquake, rushing waters and crushing debris of a tsunami? And what if, during the time of need, I do not have my lifejacket with me?

My process involves salvaging and constructing my pieces from discarded materials specific to place. Looking at generated waste provides one of the layers in which I learn about the community I am living in. It provides specific information about my community as well as an entrance into emotions that I may be unaware of or unable to touch in any other way. Sewn with the ubiquitous discarded beach lounge chairs from this tourist-drawn beach town area, Life Jacket points toward adaptability, resourcefulness and stewardship, thus a reconnect with each other and the environment that I desperately need in order to survive.

Through Life Jacket and this coast specific conversation about tsunamis, it is my desire to also speak metaphorically about a need for the assuredness of safety that is universal. Through this work I explore the general notion of survival mechanisms that we might implement in our lives to provide a sense, albeit potentially false perception of safety, in order to live in a place of fear or under constant threat of danger.