“Weybridge House Dinner Set” May 2024, Johnson Memorial Art Building, Middlebury, VT

For this project, I made an 18-person dinner set for Weybridge House—the local foods and communal living house where I have lived during college. These pots function not only as dishes to eat off of, but as a sort of scrapbook. Recorded on these pieces (rendered in a local clay slip dug from a professor’s backyard) are images of people and objects that feel emblematic of the house, and words taken from interviews with current housemates, recent alumni, and others who are involved with Weybridge’s larger community. For the opening of the show, a friend and I cooked a meal—made from all locally sourced ingredients. Guests at the show served themselves and ate together from the dinner set. A live recording was projected in another part of the gallery, and after the opening, the recorded video has been projected alongside the work.
I made this work because I love Weybridge, and I wanted to tell its story. I want people to sit down together, eat together, read stories together, and in doing so, I want them to not only catch a glimpse of, but feel what it means to live in community. We have structured society in a way that prioritizes independence. ‘Success’ tends to mean taking the best job you can possibly get and moving to wherever that takes you. Choosing to live near your family is not a measure of success. Choosing to live with your friends is not a measure of success. It’s ironic to be feeling that pressure for my future because I’ve spent the last three years living with my friends, feeling the importance of those relationships. I know that I would not have made it through college without the mutual care and joy built into living in community. That is the value of the intergenerational family structure. That is the value of the chosen family structure. Community entails a lot of joy, but that being said, it is also impossibly difficult. There’s a reason the communes of the 1970s are gone. So how do you hold all of it together? How do you tell the story of a space? How do objects hold the memories?