Nari Ward: Geography: Bottle Messenger, 2002

Nari Ward (1963) is interested in singular cultures and the spirit they confer on daily objects. He accumulates these objects to create installations with a shamanistic atmosphere. The piece Geography: Bottle Messenger is inspired by an early artwork, made up of bottles from a Shaker community in Maine. Rich in his own multicultural experience, the artist juggles with the material as he does with traditions and references. He thus poses as a storyteller of accumulated memories, equally evoking African bottle trees destined to repel bad spirits and the art of gothic stained-glass windows. This cascade of glass bottles contains a collection of hermetic messages, obsessively written in a vain hope of communicating, as by a shipwrecked survivor on a desert island...