Help us welcome back the amazing Lauren Panichelli (Corporeal Ceramics)!!

Public Parks Public Resources.

Much comes to mind when we consider public parks.

A place to breathe.

A place to relax.

A place to take in the beauty around you.

Originally, public parks were designed to provide the greater public with a natural environment where they could appreciate plant life and escape their urban environments. The mind goes to the sprawling environments of the Boston Commons or Central Park. The intention was to alleviate the strain of urban life with constructed natural environments that invoked a greater sense of nature and beauty that would inspire people beyond what they were experiencing every day. Sounds like a dream. Today the internet provides but one of a million social distractions that take one person away from experiencing the beauty around them. Competing architecture and design seems to compete for attention, but time and again humans have proven that their attention can be re-routed to collection and community.

In our contemporary society often without acknowledgement for what came before, public parks hold the potential to be a space that allows people to be people. Much like libraries, coffee shops, and the dwindling number of physical spaces that allow people to exist without purchasing anything, public parks are still sites where people experience societal scrutiny. Despite man-made attempts at constructing beautiful spaces that encourage cohesion with nature, and the imagination, it is difficult for one person to ignite that relationship on their own. Many components of public parks that make them so connective over time is the ephemera and history that they hold. Monuments can offer specific memoriam or cultural significance to a community. We can see those narratives gain new light and shift in narrative over time.

This body of work meditates on the concept and potential of some public resources that we all share. Institutions of public information such as schools and libraries are as necessary as public spaces such as parks to exist. The man made nature of these environments naturally cause societal anxiety in that not everyone is able to experience these resources in the same way. Often we expect that what is for everyone feels the same to everyone when it does not. During a time when humanism, empathy and compassion are more important than ever, we sometimes exist in states where the efforts of structured Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion are challenged. Instead of valuing our public resources ‘for all’ as an ever changing and inclusive model or system, we turn a blind eye to those who fall through the gaping craters in those resources.

As a public we could be much more capable in understanding one another, and the lived experiences around us. Storytelling, public art, being in conversation, collective imagining and dreaming of a future are all things that create cohesion between people and their ideas. In a turbulent world it can be important to guide ourselves and each other back to places where we can slow down and focus on actionable things that do good for our communities, and that inject beauty into our worlds.

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