SARAH KAVAGE
I’m a Seattle based visual artist who makes artwork about place. HOME / PROJECTS
ABOUT
PAINTING & DESIGN
CONSULTING
BEGINNINGS
Petty’s Island, Camden / Pennsauken NJ
April 2021
April 2021
Assistants
Adriana Amador-Chacon
Priscilla Rios
Monica Perez Reyes
Carpentry
Robert Zverina
Community Liaisons
Priscilla Bell
Jose Ortiz Pagan
Special thanks to
Jack McCrossin, Cari Wild, Martin Rapp
Photos
Robert Zverina
Sarah Kavage
This trio of benches, at Petty’s Island in New Jersey was the first of a number of installations made with Phragmites - an “invasive” reed that is now a prominent feature of wetlands in the east and midwest.
Crews of volunteers harvested the phrag just before the pandemic, in Jan 2020. When we were finally able to come out of lockdown and make this piece, things were starting to feel slightly less fraught and more free. Winter was giving way to spring.
Petty’s Island is also experiencing a re-emergence from decades of use as an oil and shipping terminal: 40 huge oil tanks gone. A 50 acre parking lot turned into a meadow. Environmental cleanup happening to make the site accessible as a large public park.
When I first started spending time in Philly it was hard to read the landscape, buried as it is under 400 years of colonization and development. Petty’s Island, damaged as it may be, is a small window into the original landscape of Lenapehoking. It has persisted through centuries and is now on the precipice of its next chapter. I wanted to offer a place to think about hope and rebirth - not an election sign version of hope but one that recognizes the labor and struggle that you sometimes have to go through to find it. The hope of plants that have survived a long winter.
Crews of volunteers harvested the phrag just before the pandemic, in Jan 2020. When we were finally able to come out of lockdown and make this piece, things were starting to feel slightly less fraught and more free. Winter was giving way to spring.
Petty’s Island is also experiencing a re-emergence from decades of use as an oil and shipping terminal: 40 huge oil tanks gone. A 50 acre parking lot turned into a meadow. Environmental cleanup happening to make the site accessible as a large public park.
When I first started spending time in Philly it was hard to read the landscape, buried as it is under 400 years of colonization and development. Petty’s Island, damaged as it may be, is a small window into the original landscape of Lenapehoking. It has persisted through centuries and is now on the precipice of its next chapter. I wanted to offer a place to think about hope and rebirth - not an election sign version of hope but one that recognizes the labor and struggle that you sometimes have to go through to find it. The hope of plants that have survived a long winter.
