Kolleen Keister; assignment #1.

When I walked into Sue O'Donnel's exhibition, all of the artwork was organized very nicely around the room. Each piece of artwork was either framed, hanging in line with one another, or sitting on something so that you could work with the artwork. All of the artworks related to each other in some way and complemented each other so that you could follow each piece as you walked around the room. The artworks seemed to be her narrating her life using many words, sayings, comments, and quotes. The organization, meaning, and colors used in the artworks all bring it together and make it work.

My favorite one of Sue O'Donnel's memory maps is the Secrets Jar. The colors used are black and white only, which makes me like it more. There are some sayings written on the map that are circled. Coming out of each circle are lines that are connected to other circles that either have words in them already or are blurred out so they are unable to be read. The pieces in the jar are the cutouts of the missing ones on the map. The way that the map is lied out is like that of a "web".

When I thought about my interpretation of this particular piece, I thought she went back and tried to remember everything about her childhood. She started with one memory, and attached to that memory are others that relate to that one. Each one leads to another representing the constant thinking of her mind as she grew up. Organizing her thoughts and memories in this way probably helped her to remember things that happened in her life. By opening her mind up with one memory, she could remember something off of that memory, and so on. The removal of some pieces of her map, along with the blurred out words, led me to believe these are things that she did not remember, or does not want to remember from her life. The way of putting those pieces in the jar could be her sense of bottling those memories up and forgetting them. Maybe not forgetting them, but not thinking about them. The map is organized, yet sporadic. The thoughts in the bubbles are anything from happy, to sad, or mad things that she remembers from her childhood, all of which meant something to her. I personally love to remember everything. I like to write down everything and keep pictures of everything throughout my life. This made me very attracted to her artwork, not only this piece, but the whole exhibit. I really enjoyed looking at all of it! ")