On Taking a Normal Situation and Retranslating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present
Laurie Parsons is an artist whose practices moved between sculpture and social engagement. In 1993, she participated in the exhibition On Taking a Normal Situation and Re-translating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present at M HKA as part of the year-long Antwerp 93 European Capital of Culture festival. For the exhibition, she produced a set of exact duplicates of her personal diary. From the first page, we understand that: “We pick we choose we fall. We’re caught in the circumstances.”, and from there we read all 120 dense hand-written pages about the artist’s hopes and anxieties. A year later, she quit making art altogether to become a social worker supporting homeless people and those with mental health conditions in her native city of Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.