| Title | Ancestral Pods |
| Artist / Creator | Hidde Van Duym |
| Place of Publication | Bainbridge Island, Washington |
| Publication Date | 2004 |
| Process / Technique | Copies of 19th century cyanotype photographs |
| Structure / Binding | Box construction |
| Medium / Materials | Water color, metallic powder, foam core |
| Paper Stock | Water color paper, Kozo fiber paper |
| Dimensions (WxHxD) | 10 x 12 x 3.75 inches closed |
| Edition Size | Unique |
| Signed & Numbered | Signed by the artist |
Ancestral Pods by Hidde Van Duym -SOLD!
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I made this work because I am an immigrant who tries to come to terms with a sense of family and place. I became absorbed by the vast collections of abandoned family records in America's rural small towns. I continue to search for ways of giving anonymous records a life of their own. I love the wonderfully guileless pre-snapshot look of the subjects in the photographs, and the timelessness of their presence. I saw the possibility of turning these anonymous family photographs into seed pods that open and flourish in the receptive soil of the artist and the viewer. I wanted to exploit the unique blue of the cyanotypes themselves. By creating a four-lid opening and closure, I wanted the box format to serve as a quasi-pod, reiterating the pods inside and, hoped to create a piece that combined structure, esthetics and empathy for disrupted histories into some form of transcendental experience.
Artist Bio
Born in The Hague Netherlands. For the past 24 years worked as watercolorist assembling watercolors in three-dimensional frames or box constructions. Works on view at the Roby-King Gallery on Bainbridge Island and in the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art book arts collection. Since 2000 co-curated three book arts exhibits with book arts collector Cynthia Sears at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery. Presented lecture, two-day workshop and exhibit, "Rules of Seeing, an Overview of Collage." at the Craft in America Study Center, Beverly Hills, CA. Recently, served as guest juror for the Recognition of Excellence Award, Puget Sound Book Artists Fifth Annual Membership Show. Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Nebraska with a dissertation on medieval concepts of time and space. From 2004-2008 Chair of the Board of Craft in America, producer of the PBS documentary series. 2012 Founding member and member of the board of the Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network.