Projects

The Ladies Room Project

In the year my mother would have turned 100 years old, I made 100 tiny porcelain busts, all by hand, in the style of ancient Cyclades sculptures but with my mother's distinctive large nose, French twist, and cleft chin. Then over the course of another year, I placed these pieces in public restrooms around the world, together with a little card describing my project. The work was documented contemporaneously on Instagram. My hope was that people who encountered my work would take these tiny sculptures home and reflect on the meaning of family.

Everyone who uses a public restroom leaves a little something behind. My mitochondrial DNA comes from my mother Marion and hers from her mother Leta and hers from her mother Ada and hers from her mother Edith, and so on. The little army of mothers I made and dispersed are physical representations of where I came from and where we all come from. You can track the work on one of my Instagram accounts - just search for MarionFacinger or click here.

Marion Facinger Freidson (1915-1993)

Marion Elizabeth Facinger was born on a farm in Middlefield, Ohio in 1915. She became a nurse and worked in Charity Hospital in New Orleans before joining the Army Corps of Nurses in 1942 to serve in World War II. She was stationed in North Africa and Italy, reaching the rank of Lieutenant. After the war, she entered the University of Chicago on the GI bill and attained her M.A. and Ph.D. in history. Her 1964 doctoral thesis on French queens of the Middle Ages is still cited as an early feminist work. She married, became a housewife and raised two children, one of whom had special needs. After a divorce in the mid-1960's she worked briefly as a history professor before returning to nursing. She worked for decades at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, NJ. She was elected to several terms on the Leonia (NJ) town council where she advocated for environmental issues and against nuclear armaments and war. She loved her family, nature, and intellectual conversation. She was an avid reader, a writer of letters, a gardener, seamstress, baker, birdwatcher, and much beloved by her friends, family and colleagues. She died too soon in Brooklyn, NY in 1993.

The Father Fish Project

Eliot Freidson (1923-2005)

My father always seemed to me to be larger than other fathers despite his diminutive stature. His intellect was formidable and he was not always easy to have as a father, but I still miss him every day. In 2017, I completed a project to celebrate one of his greatest gifts to me.

My dad loved to go fishing and he was generous in sharing that love with me. When I was small, the two of us would get up while it was still dark, dig some nightcrawlers from the backyard and he would drive out to Lake Hopatcong (NJ) where we would fish all morning for sunfish and perch. Later during our interminable summer family camping trips in the Adirondacks, he and I would get up at dawn to fish Indian Lake where we would occasionally catch a pike or pickerel, and more often just a mess of perch to fry up for breakfast. Still later, after he bought a house in Sag Harbor (NY) he would pilot his Boston whaler into the Great Peconic Bay to fish for bluefish, spanish mackerel and striped bass, sometimes giving the fish as much as half an hour to bite.

From my father, I learned the joy of preparing for a fishing trip and the thrill of bringing a catch in. I learned to bait a hook, to cast, to clean my catch and to savor the taste of my own labors, being careful never to catch more than I could eat. And I realized that my accomplished, restless father was his most relaxed and happy when near to the water, even when the fish weren't biting.

I made each of my 75 ceramic fish in a press mold and then slapped the two sides together to form a hollow fish with a little surprise inside. I decorated them to look like the Blue Gill Sunfish we used to catch on Lake Hopatcong. These fish hang on the walls of my home, reminding me of the special days I spent with my father throughout his life.

Pandemic Shrines

During my travels, I have often been drawn to photograph the small, personal altars and memorials which I see in other cultures. Some are religious, others less so, but I always find it moving that the caretakers of all these little shrines have spent so much time and energy maintaining them.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, while quarantined at home much of the time, I felt acutely the loss of familiar, social rituals I had depended upon in normal times. It was this loss that inspired my shrine project.

I started making smallish boxes, open on one side, sort of like a stage in a theatre, and just kept going with the idea. It turns out that populating a shrine with tiny porcelain furniture, birds, cats, fish, binoculars, books, etc. is really fun. It certainly kept my hands busy until normal times returned.