A couple summers ago, we scavenged a china doll remnant at Dead Horse Bay. Using this object as a source of inspiration, we explored the fragmented and obscuredhistory of repeated loss and displacement tied to the southeast shore of Brooklyn. In addition to everything left behind from displaced Barren Island locals in the 1930’s, the forced evictions around the greater New York City area for the creation of roadways in the ‘50s produced an overflow of personal belongings that were also dumped on the peninsula as landfill. Although Dead Horse Bay became a graveyard of items for various communities, we were compelled to imagine that this china doll was owned by one of the immigrant children who went to school on Barren Island during the 1930’s, since we ourselves work with children. During our artist residency at Beginning with Children Charter School in Brooklyn, we spoke with the art classes about the history of Barren Island. We had the children wonder what it would have been like to suddenly be told to move away from their homes and not have the means to bring everything they owned with them. The discussion ended with us giving each child a plaster cast of the original china doll. We asked each of them to consider the plaster doll their own, and to paint it in whatever way they chose to. Over the course of the next several months, we took a simulative approach by returning these dolls back to the beach; we inlaid them in plaster along with glass, debris, and sand from Dead Horse Bay. Each tile became our empathetic projection of loss that the individual children of Barren Island endured. All together, the reproduced army of dolls concretize the recurring tragic histories of displacement in New York City.
