Catalog Entry from If These Walls Could Talk Exhibit, Neill-Cochran House 2020:

This sculpture was designed in response to the room in which it is placed in the Neill- Cochran house museum. This former bedroom now boasts a “reveal” of the understructure of the wall, left uncovered after a restoration several years ago. This exhibits the craftsmanship of the enslaved artisans who built this house in 1856. The plaster is as fine as Italian Renaissance fresco work, and it covers rock walls up to 18 inches thick. Note the wood used as a transom over the window. Could enslaved people be artisans? That point has been hotly debated in this exhibition. Why would an unpaid worker with little or no say in the matter contribute toward craftsmanship or beauty for somebody else? The crafts of building and ornamentation required extensive training. But the care taken with the construction of the Neill- Cochran House shows that these laborers obviously took pride in their good work. That is a thing humans do even in the most oppressed of times. My Cover Up is a fictional roll of wallpaper, painted to look like the popular ivy pattern of the 1940s-50s. I found a wallpaper kit from that time, and besides the usual pasting and smoothing brushes, it included a booklet for the cheerful housewife do-it-yourselfer. It also included a plumb line for her, here done up in white gold--a simple weight on a string, plumb lines are associated with ancient masonry, wall builders, to keep things in line. This roll of wallpaper is not only crooked, it contains offensive images of nostalgic plantation life, where enslaved workers are depicted in three scenes as “happy darkies.” The scenes are adapted from popular late 19th century Currier and Ives lithographs, a series called Darktown. Such images will be subjected to what the ancient Hebrew prophets called the “plumb line of justice.” (Isaiah 28:16)