Cheryl talked about how she took a glass blasting class. In this class she created a ship and thought that it looked "ghostly": this is where her inspiration came from. With this idea in mind, she searched "ghost ship" in the thousands of pictures that the British Library had just released and found images of the global slave trade. She etched these images into glass and created her exhibit using multiple images in a row to tell a story. Her work is going to go on display in the Museum of the African Diaspora where she was recognized as a new Emerging Artist.
Nate started his story by telling us how he was a nurse in the ICU. As he continued, he said that he started off using the electrocardiograms from his patients as his medium and inspiration. From there he was inspired from the idea of multi cellular living that was present in all of his patients. He took this idea to plain paper and a pen and drew simple designs. He then switched to a knife and made cut outs, lines and scratches. The marks he made with the knife were intimate, just like the relationships that he had with his patients and he wanted that to be clearly represented. As he became more comfortable he moved onto ink cut outs of people. On the cutouts he would make patterns that looked like a real human. In three images next to each other, there is a slow decline in the amount of black present, which represents life slowly slipping away from inside someone. Moving forward Nate said he hopes to add more movement to the figures in his pieces and focus in on the injustice of the lack of health care for African Americans.
Hearing both of the artists talk was very intriguing. Hearing their stories and inspirations first hand made the art come alive and made me more connected to the story behind the pieces. Overall I enjoyed both displays and the history behind how they came about.
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