In this poignant article, Working with Care: How Pratt Students and Faculty Are Creating in the Space of Compassion Summer 2021 Prattfolio magazine
Jean Hartig says this about my Ordinary Reliquaries:
"Acknowledging where we are and what we are experiencing has been central to recent work by Linda Lauro-Lazin, MFA Fine Arts ’17, assistant chair of digital arts and a professor in the department, who shared two projects that confront care and loss, personally and collectively. One of them, Ordinary Reliquaries, was shown earlier this year in the exhibition The Vision of Care, curated by Robert Shane and organized by the Woodstock Art Gallery and Museum to bring together work that highlights the role art plays in maintaining and restoring the world.
Ordinary Reliquaries holds the presence of a beloved person, specifically Lauro-Lazin’s late father, in objects suspended in time and space. “When my father was in hospice, I was with him every day. I cared for him. I helped him with the most ordinary activities (just as he had done for me),” she wrote. “I made these sculptures at Urban Glass in Brooklyn in the months immediately after my father passed. The objects frozen in glass refer to ephemerality and connection through the familiar. The ice-like vessel holds a barely visible final message. The real objects aren’t there. The cast glass is simply empty where the objects would be.”
Another memorial work by Lauro-Lazin, Floating Grace, addresses the ongoing experience of the pandemic with lanterns containing words from people around the world and rituals of their lighting and release on rivers in the Hudson Valley."