I thought some of you might like to see and hear a little bit about Danielle's thesis project she just finished. The photos are from the UCSB exhibit opening last night (5/20). It turned out great!
Here's a first draft, rough excerpt from her written thesis that sort of explains what it's about:
The Child Estate consisted of a large mansion which sat along the coastline in Santa Barbara from just before the turn of the century until the 1960s and which now houses the local zoo. What distinguished the property from other large oceanfront estates was its eccentric proprietor the twice widowed New Englander Lillian Child. After the death of her second husband around the height of the great depression Child came to the aid of two squatters who were being escorted off her property by local police. Child told the men they were welcome to stay on her property as long as they liked, provided they weren’t involved in any mischief. From these first inhabitants a community of wandering homeless men sprang up on her property, with the men constructing makeshift homes and eventually organizing a system of self governance with an elected mayor. The men used discarded items from the local community which they scavenged from the city dump as the materials to construct their dwellings. In 1941 the Santa Barbara News Press described this process of reuse: “the older inhabitants of Childstown search the city dump for rags, bottles, brass, coffee, iron, aluminum, etc. which they sell each night to a whole sale junk buyer who stops by daily. They also use materials to build with, wood for fuel, cardboard boxes, crates, barrels and scrap metal.” At its height in the 1940s this impromptu village, which came to be known as ‘Childville’, housed a total of 125 men.
Lillian Child came to be seen as somewhat of a patron saint to these migrant men or ‘knights of the road’. She was referred to by several titles by men who lived in Childville including, the grand little lady, the lady and the saint of eucalyptus hill and she called the men ‘her boys’.
With this history as a starting point, I worked to conceive of a project which would navigate between specific historical references/allusions and my basic intuited experience with Santa Barbara as a place. This duality came to a head for me in my thesis project titled My Childville. Slowly the history of the Child estate began to emerge for me as a mythology which weaved together with various personal associations I have with the Santa Barbara area, beginning with characters taken from the Nutcracker ballet which I performed in as a child. The strong feminine archetype of Lillian Child began to fuse in my mind with the Nutcracker character of Mother Ginger. This maternal character in the ballet typically wears an enormous skirt which houses her children or ‘ginger snaps’ who only come out from under their mothers skirt to perform a dance. I decided that I would also conflate the men of Childville with the characters of the rats who act as the antagonists in the ballet. From here, the piece evolved into the creation of an enormous skirt, acting as a remnant or symbol of Lillian, and within the skirt placed in the center of the large circular space would be a cage containing a scale model of the topography of the Child estate housing a village of shelters which are all constructed with discarded paper and plastic products and which are all slowly being chewed away at by live rats. I want the viewer to experience the piece by entering the nine foot by ten foot skirt and while examining the model village they themselves become sheltered by this symbol of Lillian implicating them in the same context as the rats. Beneath her skirt she simultaneously offers protection and cages elements of the social periphery. The project for me was meant to allude to circumstances or various elements within society which we tend to shy away from and yet when confronted with these things we reconsider our original hesitations, essentially things which can be both menacing and enticing. Ultimately I wanted to balance symbols and references that are enigmatic which those which are iconographic. I see the final piece as addressing a multitude of interests for me including housing, reuse, and feminine maternal archetypes, while all being filtered through this specific history and my own personal experience.
