Nancy Wu and Jean Davis

Jean Davis and Nancy Wu, two women from Brooklyn, began sculpting with glass after taking weekly trips to a local landfill, a centuries-old, coastal spot, with all sorts of washed up wreckage. Without yet understanding why, they felt compelled to collect and hold onto these broken and cast-aside fragments. From beneath the litter and debris, or perhaps through it, beauty was found. The two women began to revive the shards, piecing them together and turning them into something entirely new, resurrecting discarded trash into treasure. The sculptures of Resurrect Studio both capture light and reflect it, creating mesmerizing and ethereal visuals, some like ice crystals, others like hearths.

 

Wu has worked as an architectural designer. Davis comes from a background of abstract figurative painting, a teacher of art therapy. Both women know something about salvaging and creating. Both women are also mothers. In 2016, Wu experienced the unimaginable loss of her young daughter. She began making art as a means of coping with the trauma and grief, and Davis was able to meet her in that most challenging of times, working through her own journey as well. The two have been in lock-step ever since, co-creating, and bringing light and luster to places of darkness.

 

Depending on the tide, the inventory varies greatly like the catch of the day. How has our great-grandparents’ garbage become our generations’ gemstones? What will our children be mining? Our treatment is not traditional, and with less traditional material comes less traditional art aimed at finding the transcendent in the ordinary.