Material Connections / Children At Play
Artists: Eden Radfarr & Emily Tironi
And When At Last They Reached The Shore, Eden Radfarr 2021 from Material Connections
From the beginning, our collaboration has centered on connection. The connection between materials, time, place, and people. Throughout the residency, we exchanged materials and notes through the mail. These materials included collected images, painted papers, dried plants, and recycled materials from around the house such as pieces of clothing and junk mail. We made our first collages from materials we had each collected and combined from our past projects. The series “Material Connections” began as an exploration of materials and techniques, exchanging our perspectives and ways of working. Some pieces we created individually while others we mailed back and forth.
Electric, Emily Tironi 2021 from Material Connections
Through the exchanges in “Material Connections”, we discovered a specific combination of source material that proved to be rich in imagery and thematic content, which generated our ongoing series “Children at Play.” Emily combined images of children playing from the book “Children’s Play Spaces; From sandbox to adventure playground” that Eden had sent her with backgrounds from an old children’s atlas book, “The Children’s Picture Atlas of the World,” and Eden suggested adding text from the book. Eden created sound art to accompany the images using image to sound software and then editing and adding to the sound. By juxtaposing these two sources, Emily discovered myriad ways to comment on environmental and social exploitation, colonization and capitalism.
Forced To Fly, Emily Tironi 2021 from Children At Play
Emptiness Exploited, Emily Tironi 2021 from Children At Play
Producing Possesses Worth, Emily Tironi 2021 from Children At Play
Raw Power Consumes, Emily Tironi 2021 from Children At Play
Winds of Time, Eden Radfarr & Emily Tironi Mixed Media Collage 2021 from Material Connections
The Painters, Emily Tironi Mixed Media Collage 2021 from Material Connections
You can view more of Emily & Eden’s works in both Material Connections and Children At Play at https://emilytironi.wixsite.com/materialconnections
The Artists and their Reflections
Eden Radfarr
Eden Radfarr is a interdisciplinary artist based in Albuquerque, NM. She uses found materials to work intuitively and spontaneously, allowing the process to guide her practice towards connections, juxtapositions, disorientations, and recombinations.
I really enjoyed the creative challenges that this collaboration presented. I use a lot of collage-like techniques in other media, so I was surprised at how much of a challenge collage itself was for me, which has taught me a lot about my own creative processes and working through obstacles. It was really gratifying when, after months of exchange, experimentation and my own struggles to actually finish work, we discovered an alchemy in the “Children at Play” material that was inspiring for both of us and contained a body of substantive content that we are both really engaged with. I look forward to continuing to work with Emily on this and other projects.
Emily Tironi
Emily Tironi is a mixed media collage artist living and practicing in Cambridge, NY. As a woman with a disability, she uses collage to challenge societal norms regarding disability and to show her perspective on issues impacting the disability community.
During this residency, I have learned a lot and grown as an artist. The experience improved my ability to work with other artists and create a cohesive whole. Through my collaboration, I have learned to work with new materials and media and break the frame. I have really enjoyed meeting with Eden throughout the year and seeing how our project progressed and came together. This has been an important experience for me as an artist and I hope to continue to work with Eden in the future.