140. Hiding in Plain Sight – Jill Kearney
Treasure hunting is a creative and hopeful act, a commitment to finding beauty in what is ordinary, discarded, or hiding in plain sight.
I am the daughter of a sculptor who frequented the dump in Provincetown, Massachusetts. My father’s career as a sculptor was made possible by the things he discovered buried under heaps of rotting bananas and broken beach umbrellas. I accompanied him on these forays, and I loved it there. I was a beachcomber and constructed museums out of broken shells, shoe leather, and the most lovely thing of all: stems from eighteenth-century Irish clay pipes that still washed in with the tide.
Treasure hunting is a creative and hopeful act, a commitment to finding beauty in what is ordinary, discarded, or hiding in plain sight. And for me, the finding is only the beginning. After that comes the process of inventing something out of what I have found. These objects speak to me while I’m driving, or in the shower, and tell me what is next. It isn't the thing itself that matters, but the meaning I coax out of it, or where it leads me, or the new use I find.
This act of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary reminds me of the photographer Sally Mann, who pointed her camera at the thing that was inches from her, the quotidian life of parenting, stripped of its romance, but bursting with mystery, sadness, strangeness, impermanence, and beauty. How many photographers before her failed to notice what was right under their noses? She was a close observer of the minute details of her own lived experience, which is, in essence, what art is made of, and also treasure.
