Stone Fruit Exhibition

About

Stone Fruit is a site for contemplation. It is an orchard, a cemetery, a well, a beach. It is a participatory installation which is co-authored by the community that engages with it during its exhibition. During the exhibition, organized by Jesse J Ring, Stone Fruit will be one iteration of this ongoing community sculpture intended to create locations where visitors leave thoughts as material in symbolic gesture at a site for contemplation. Stone Fruit invites you to participate with the installation through sculpting a small trace in soft clay to leave behind as part of the work. All contributions will be fired at the close of the exhibition and permanently added to the work.

Originally exhibited at the Pensacola Museum of Art in 2021, the installation’s prompt responded to the profound trauma we as a society suffered over the course of COVID-19 and acknowledged that we all had something to leave behind from the experience. Following its debut, the Director and Curator of PMA noted that on average participants spent 30-45 minutes with the installation. Following the exhibition, over 400 of these objects were photographed before being fired and added to the work. Approximately 200 photographs were then used to compile an artist book of visual poems that reflected the themes apparent in the objects left behind by the community. One goal of this exhibition is to produce a similar record of offerings from the local audience.

Stone Fruit at NCC presents an opportunity to update the prompt for participation to respond to the Twin Cities and the communities that NCC Serves. Ring aims to identify and invite groups from the community, with a focus on community members who may not regularly visit the gallery, to add to the work through visits and short workshops in the exhibition. Through this exhibition, he hopes to expand the community’s exposure to ceramics and advocate for the importance of the cognitive and expressive value of craft and art.