Sarah Abeykoon
Words that weren’t enough but never spoken
Class of: 2028
Major: Strategic Design and Management BBA
Medium: Mixed Media
Faculty: Ruth Liberman
Prompt: For this Bridge project, we were asked to choose a deceased artist who lived in New York and research their life and work. Using storytelling, research, and visual symbolism, we had to curate an exhibition that included a creative map and a collection of objects that we either bought, thrifted, or found lying around. These objects were then transformed into speculative items that could have belonged to the artist— objects that reflect their identity, creative career, and personal journey. The goal was to construct a speculative archive offering insight into the artist’s life and work within the context of New York City.
The subject of focus revolves around Robert Mapplethorpe. A New York-born and raised artist, pivotal to the world of photography. At the peak of his career, after having had many of his works publicly, his creative career was cut short due to his tragic death in 1989 from AIDS. Apart from photography, Mapplethorpe experimented with many other mediums that would be representative of the journey to his creative career and self-identity. Mapplethorpe had a way of expressing so much through something seemingly so simple as a photograph. This project aims to explore the tension between himself and the world expressed through his creative outlet, hence words that weren’t enough but were never spoken, but rather expressed visually.