Cloud Garden is a site-specific outdoor installation and community project by artist, Monica Banks. Installed in the trees of Guild Hall’s Furman Garden, tangles of wire, balled-up deer fencing, feathers, pop tops from seltzer cans, unidentifiable pieces of hardware, and other artifacts from the artist’s everyday life hang as mobiles, creating dangling objects that shimmer in the air like the stories we tell about ourselves.
Banks’ “Cloud” series began in 2006 when the artist received boxes of her childhood toys, jewelry and trinkets. Wanting to give meaning to her history through sculpture, Banks combined souvenirs of her present life with these fragments of her past in tangles of wire that hang, cloud-like, from ceilings or tree branches. She is revisiting this process during the Covid–19 pandemic, when like most of us, she is spending more time at home immersed in the minutia of domestic life. The work in this installation updates her materials as a record of this extraordinary time, and includes samples from the bag of orphan socks she discovered in the back of a closet, pieces of a wall sculpture she made for her infant son (now 24 years old), fingertips of unused gloves, tufts of fur from her new puppy, and shards of the Nerf soccer ball he attacked, along with other items unearthed during the prolonged quarantine.
The installation expands into Guild Hall’s Minikes Garden with an exhibit of student work; Saturday, September 19 – Monday, October 12. Through remote workshops with The Bridgehampton Childcare & Recreational Center, Banks has shared her work and process with children of The Center, resulting in an installation of the children’s own cloud sculptures.
Curator
Christina Strassfield, Museum Director/Chief Curator
Project Coordinator
Anthony Madonna, The Patti Kenner Fellow in Arts Education
Cloud Garden is on view during regular Museum Hours. The Guild Hall Gardens are self-monitoring spaces; we ask that patrons observe proper physical-distancing, observe maximum capacity signage, and wear face-coverings on the grounds.