“Meet me at the fence ok bye” by Leslie Diuguid

Artist’s Statement:

Analyzing thrifted artifacts that act as a material memory. Finding the border between childhood and adulthood. Detritus of the past. While homecoming to care for aging parents I excavated a 1990 phone book filled with handwritten notes, addresses, and marker tests.

Remembering the brief, hurried and anxious need to play. A question phrased as a statement between friends calling to meet up for a day of swinging, biking, playing games and running around the neighborhood. My dad told me not to call before 10am as it would be rude.

Remembering the phone as a stationary tool you went to before it became life consuming. My friend, Susan Kemp and I would make the breathless call, hang up, and simultaneously bolt out toward the fence followed by an excited dog and a slamming screen door behind us.

The use of screenprinting allows media to take on a new life. To dismantle tattered rags and revisit old phone books as a coming of age archive.

Stepping through items that have become a part of my identity. Zooming in on heavily worn clothes and expanding focal points of interest layered with excerpts of handwritten letters from my younger self and family members. Holding test marks of all kinds—stains, spills and splatters in high esteem accumulated over the course of decades.

This fixation on gestures suggests the portrait of a ghost.

Some clothing gifted, others bought, all saved and all whose diminishing quality acts as a nonlinear origin story for the necessity to protect and house a growing body.

Thinking middle out, I’m partial to trees as icons that represent heliotropic growth toward a brighter future while digging deeper into the fabric from which I originated.