MARY O'MALLEY

Materials: Digital print, Lizella Clay, Luster

Dimensions:d L304 x H90 x W2.5”

 

     I returned to my childhood home on the south shore of Long Island for ten months during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Our street ends at the shoreline of the Great South Bay, where, looking south, you can see the barrier islands and inlets of Fire Island. The landscape is low and expansive, offering an uninterrupted view of the horizon. My family and I would often walk down the block to watch the sunset. This ritual became an anchor, an act of quiet devotion during a suspended moment in time. Each sunset unfolded as a distinct visual opera: clouds shifting shape, light refracting through atmosphere and water. We captured these walks on our phones and shared them with family and friends we longed to see, small acts of connection across distance.
    Fire Island, visible across the bay, can only be reached by ferry and is inhabited mostly during the summer. When the sun would set lights would begin to appear across the bay on the island. To see signs of life there during the pandemic in the off-season felt both comforting and unsettling. It revealed the isolation of that time, as well as the strange persistence of normalcy elsewhere. The activity on the distant island mirrored the choices people made to seek safety and meaning: to separate, to wait, to continue living, even from afar. Squished out clay along the horizon is dotted with gold luster and bronze nailheads representing these small signs of life.
    Mosaic draws from these sunset walks, the large-scale mosaics, murals, and stained-glass windows my grandfather designed for churches, and a broken phone screen protector my mother sent me during lockdown. She was the one who noticed its resemblance to my grandfather’s mid-century stained glass, just after we had spent a day visiting several of his churches in Brooklyn and Queens. The image of the cracked iPhone screen laid over the bay became a reminder of the lens through which so many of these moments were experienced and shared, a surface that both connected and distanced us.
    Though it depicts a single continuous image, the image is divided into color panels representing the four seasons repeated and the passage of time. The segmentation reflects the stillness of the pandemic, when days felt suspended even as the world turned.