Tree, Rock and Bench Hugs

Description: Temporary installations using painted canvas pieces to construct and throw colorful blankets around trees and over rocks and benches.
Duration: Flexible, each installation will last 1 day only.
Location: Central Park.

A group of ideas about throwing color blankets over and around objects in Central Park non-destructively, ephemeral splashes of color that could be also semi-permanent - the ideas came to me while working with the paper Giant Hands around Central Park and realizing how difficult and fragile paper is and the scale of the park requires serious amount of material that is resistant to wind tearing and water.

 Bench Hugs

In Central Park there are a lot of benches with inscriptions plaques on them. I always wondered about the people in the inscriptions and their lives. I wanted to give these benches a hug. I came up with the Bench Hugs incidentally while throwing the hands around in the park working on other installations.

This is one of several installations where I plan to make hands out of canvas so they are more sturdy, durable and could withstand some handling. Several Canvas Hands will be sewn together to make a bench throw or what I call Bench Hugs. The Bench Hugs could also be used like bench throws or blankets so people could sit on them as well.

Accidental Bench Hugs in Central Park, while putting the hands on benches I realized I want to do this with larger hands made out of canvas.

 Rock Hugs

In Central Park there are a lot of large, free standing rocks - I want to wrap them in a blanket made of strips of canvas left over from previous performance art and other projects, and painted with unused paint and brush wipes.

Rock Hugs made of sewn together left over canvas pieces painted with acrylic paint.

Rock Hug - in 2018 I draped some paper hands over some large rocks in Central Park but soon realized that I need to create the hands out of canvas for this idea to work.

Tree Hugs

Revisit the Tree Hugs installations with Canvas Hands - I had some serious problems working with the hands due to wind constantly tearing at the hands, it literally sliced a few in half and had to chase them around the park.

Tree Hugs, I realized, will need to be constructed out of canvas hands. While I worked with the paper hands they were constantly blown around, torn to pieces and blown across the lawns, and I had to chase them down. The park people allowed me to place the hands around the trees but not attach them to the trees so the idea worked albeit with the wrong material.