“Find Your Own Space” 

In mid-March of 2020, pandemic lockdowns caused people around the globe to shut their doors and spend more time inside. Schools and offices went remote, Zoom meetings became an everyday occurrence, and families and loved ones were spending more time together in their homes. For the Teare’s, that was no different.

Susan Teare’s children flew back to their childhood home in Essex Junction, Vermont to stay with her and her husband, Tom. Her son, Kirk, had to leave the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was studying environmental, product, and lighting design. Suddenly, the home was full again, with the entire family riding out the pandemic together.  

Kirk and Susan started drawing together to pass the time and began to reflect on their Victorian house. They would draw the different rooms, doorways, and spaces at different times of the day, stirring up memories from earlier times of family and loved ones who would pass through the home and share in its beauty. 

​​“We always have all the windows and doors open in the summer,” Kirk said. “The breeze and sometimes leaves flow through the house. And there's a specific feeling and tone in each room.”

This quality time together sparked an idea for an art installation based on the architecture of their Essex Junction home. 

The installation, titled “Find Your Own Space,” consists of nine silk panels, printed by Cone Editions Press in East Topsham, Vermont. Susan photographed doors and entryways on the first floor in their home and printed each one of them on silk fabric, to essentially reconstruct the layout of their home. Collaborating with Kirk, they designed and planned polycarbonate and stainless steel structures to frame and house the silk pieces within. They worked closely with Vermont Plastics Specialty, Inc. on the selection of the polycarbonate. Then, they installed the pieces into the landscape at the Lemon Fair Sculpture Park.

The park, based on several acres of land in Shoreham, Vermont, features a self-guided mile-long mowed path where visitors can walk through the rural landscape and view over 50 sculptures by rotating artists from all over the United States, including one from Argentina. Teare’s installation sits at the top of a hill, the structures rising from the landscape and framing the sky behind it. At the right time of day, the sun catches in the silk pieces and illuminates them from behind, revealing the printed textures within.

The durable frames represent the architecture of a home and the safe shelter it provides, Susan Teare explained, while the light, fragile silk pieces represent us as humans. The silk responds to the elements and the weather and the changing light, just as humans respond to their surroundings. 

“They’re photographs of the colors, textures, and light in our home that we carried to the existing landscape,” she added. “They illuminate the light of the past and they merge together in the present.”

“Find Your Own Space” would not have happened if it weren’t for the huge community effort behind it all. Time spent apart from friends and loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the world just how much we need others to get things done and community action is instrumental in making change. 

Susan and Kirk not only collaborated with each other on the installation, but also had design assistance from Susan’s husband and Kirk’s father, Tom Teare. George Zavis, a close friend of the Teares, also helped greatly with the execution of the structures. Zavis has an extensive background in design, and helped make the structures not only beautiful, but safe for patrons to observe. 

“It became more than the sum of its parts,” Zavis reflected on the “Find Your Own Space” installation. “It’s almost like a portal; the reflection of the polycarbonate responds to the wind, takes your image, and distorts the reflection.”

The installation also changes based on time of day. During the day, the silk pieces fly up in the wind which pulls them out of their frames and distorts their edges. At dawn and dusk, when the wind dies down, the fabric drops down and becomes still. Solar lights flicker on, one by one, illuminating the structures like windows in a house at dusk.

With all of her work, Susan Teare creates healing spaces for reflection, and for individuals to have a lived experience interacting with art. Her site-specific installations are each uniquely integrated into the earth and become a part of the landscape they sit in, changing day to day, hour to hour, with the elements and changing seasons around them. “Find Your Own Space” is no different, acting as a record of the time they have spent out there. 

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