I grew up in a town with the most famous main street in America, the place where Norman Rockwell lived and painted that scene and many others. My house was around the corner from the Norman Rockwell Museum. When I visit home, I can walk there and look over the river that Charles Ives composed songs about and across to the Berkshire Hills where church steeples rise though treetops.

When I left the east coast for the southwest eighteen years ago, I didn’t realize how nostalgic I would become for the place where I grew up. Stockbridge, Massachusetts is the quintessential New England town. White Christmases, green springtimes, golden summers, vibrant autumns, mud season (there are five seasons in New England); these are the seasons that live in me even when my adopted New Mexican landscape shimmers like a jewel. New Mexico has influenced my work as an art teacher and artist and given me a new palette of colors and textures. But against all the stunning vistas and views and traditions, my memories of home have grown more vivid. So it is not surprising that the art I make is nostalgic. In my digital collages, I use objects and images that remind me of my childhood, my grandparents, the people and places I recall in my memories. Smocked party dresses, etiquette rules from earlier times, Cracker Jack box prizes, Golden Books, printed handkerchiefs, references to fairy tales and lullabies and nursery rhymes appear in my work arranged in patterns that draw the viewer in and allow different ways of seeing. My work has a universal appeal because it uses images and objects that everyone can relate to, that are part of our culture and social history.

I manipulate objects and images in a way that has meaning and interest beyond the objects themselves, and that give the pieces another level of metaphor. Repetitions and overlapping, layerings and juxtapositions of objects create my designs. In my dress series, I scanned the fronts of my aunt’s hand-smocked baby dresses, and over them, printed rules and images from an old etiquette book I found on my grandparents’ book shelf in their summer house in Connecticut.

My images are my version of contemporary mandalas. A mandala is a Buddhist or Hindu symbol. In Buddhism and Hinduism, a mandala is a geometric or pictorial design usually enclosed in a circle, representing the entire universe. Mandalas are used in meditation and ritual. In Jungian psychology, a mandala is a symbol representing self and inner harmony. In my mandala-like images I use toys, fabrics and accessories that I have kept for years. I remember my sister and I playing with our Cindy dolls and Ginny dolls for hours. The dolls did so many things; they rode horses, went ice-skating, got married, rode motorcycles and had picnics. We hated cleaning up our mini- doll world; their clothes, shoes, and furniture would be strewn all over my bedroom floor. My digital collages bring order to the chaos. The past comes to life and enters the present.

Arranging and duplicating familiar things is a form of meditation and ritual for me. Colors and objects come together like pieces of a puzzle. My artwork lifts my spirits and reminds me of where I came from. It offers me a way to maintain my connection and closeness to the people and places that define me.

(Elisabeth Gillett is the featured artist at the Stockbridge Library in Stockbridge, Massachusetts during the month of July. She
can be contacted regarding sales at [email protected]).

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