Emily Jay

(and let my darkness become trees)

Vestige is a site-specific performance created in the summer of 2016 in Ålvik, Norway. Using thin plaster molds of my body, which I envisioned to be like second skins or envelopes of myself, I created a series of “Vestiges”.  Each part of the body was specifically chosen for the personal and cultural meanings associated with it, and the mold was then further adorned through writings and decoration.  I buried these Vestiges at the foot of the mountain that Ålvik resides below.  After six weeks I disinterred the objects to observe and document how the landscape transformed them.  The project was ultimately a gesture, a way to bury former ways of being at the feet of the eternal.  It was a poetic vision of how planting a garden for pain might transform it. 

Many thanks to Kunstnarhuset Messen for enabling this project to happen.

fourth and fifth Vestiges

first two Vestiges

interior view

(if only we could see

all of these)

(we must paint our insides gold)

after the burying

(what lies beneath)

what is left

unburied

(where ever I go)

the last Vestiges, unburied

interior view

(can we see these things?)

Vestige

noun

1. a mark, trace, or visible evidence of something that is no longer present or in existence

2. a surviving evidence or remainder of some condition, practice, etc.

3. a very slight trace or amount of something

4. Biology. a degenerate or imperfectly developed organ or structure that has little or no utility, but that in an earlier stage of the individual or in preceding evolutionary forms of the organism performed a useful function

5. Archaic. a footprint; track