HADDAD | DRUGAN

Daily Madame Defarge knitting of steel and brass wire became an occupation…

Laura Haddad was granted a stay as an artist-in-residence at Fort Worden State Park, on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Her interest in Fort Worden was in its abandoned bunkers and batteries, dusty relics from an era of wars fought by sea. Those austere, lonely structures verging on ruin were the environment in which she imagined displaying her twisted metal wire.

In total she created about forty different "bunker jewel" installations. This was in part a study in contrasts, in which feminine, organic sculpture was added to masculine, modern architecture. But there was also a similarity between the hard galvanized steel knit into fragile forms and the concrete deteriorating into ruin.

The skeletal sculpture calls forth ghosts from the architecture. The project speaks to themes of abandonment and occupation, forgetting and remembering.