Vanitas Still Life with Bats
2015Recent evidence connecting fruit bats with over 60 human-transmissable diseases (including Ebola, SARS, and Nipah) is paired with the story of "plague stones" used during the Middle Ages as a point of commerce, where trade between the afflicted and the healthy could still be accomplished. The fruit bats, stitched together from pieces of recycled clothing, hang from stuffed animals, as orphaned fruit bats do in bat rescues, in the back storeroom of a disused commercial clothing store within the empty Global Mall. The replica of the plague stone from Eyam in Derbyshire, UK, sits below. This work was part of an exhibition titled In Place, which invited artists to make work in response to the site. All participating artists designed a spread for the accompanying zine/catalogue (pictured above).
Installation in the back storeroom of empty clothing store #122 in the mostly-vacant Global Mall, Antioch, Tennessee.
Fabric fruit bats sewn from clothing, toy stuffed animals, replica of plague stone/boundary stone from Eyam, Derbyshire, UK, text