Queen Simon and the Sommeloth, 2011
Made in collaboration with the artist Daniel Luchman
Fabric, stuffing, one leather English saddle, rip-stop nylon, six papier-mâché eyeballs, an illustrated book, one audio soundtrack and story, wooden cave, lights, speakers, wooden platform
Dimensions variable
Commissioned for the Tough Art Residency at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Exhibited at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
September 2011 - February 2012
Live performance with Daniel Bachman, December 2011
Other collaborators on this project include:
- Art Creation Foundation for Children: a non-profit organization in Haiti that supports children in the arts. We commissioned them to create all the papier-mache objects in the installation.
- Saturday Light Brigade radio studio facilitated recordings for the audio book.
- The musician Daniel Bachman, whose song "Perigree Moon" played continuously inside the wooden structure with audio recording of story
- And many wonderful children at the museum. They wrote and narrated the book after looking at my drawings and telling me what they saw.
About: Queen Simon and the Sommeloth began with a simple idea about two characters, one on the land and one in the sky, that lived at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. The Tough Art Residency offered at the museum is for an artist (or artist-team) to spend one summer designing and building an artwork for the museum, tough enough for kids to enjoy and use. Daniel and I knew we somehow wanted to make work about these two funny invented characters, but did not imagine we would involve so many amazing collaborators and bring so many ideas, media, techniques, and approaches to the work. In the end it was a great success and the best part was seeing how much the kids enjoyed riding the leather saddle of the giant pink Sommeloth.