Insights on Site
One-Day Contemporary Art Installations at the White-Ellery House

Life Observed by Sarah Wonson is the final installation in the series this year. The White-Ellery House (1710) has served as the backdrop for a series of one-day contemporary art installations by local artists for seven years running. This program is free and open to the public as part of Escapes North 17th Century Saturdays. The House is located at 245 Washington Street in Gloucester at the Route 128 Grant Circle Rotary; parking is available off Poplar Street in the field behind the house. 

About the Installation

In Life Observed, Wonson’s interests in making art converge with her reverence for Colonial-period architecture. Returning home to Gloucester in 2011 after living away for eight years, Wonson began to take notice of the wealth of beautiful colonial-era homes around Cape Ann; each one with its own character, friendly, foreboding, comical, etc. “I wanted to learn more about Colonial period buildings,” states Wonson, “so I began visual research in The White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs.” These pamphlets, filled with atmospheric, shadowy black and white photographs of historic houses, captivated Wonson, and she has been drawing and contemplating them since. “[While] the formal aspects of the structures interested me initially, over time my focus has shifted towards the relationship between where we dwell and the human imprint we leave behind. The home is not just a building, it is a place where we store our experience.”

Last year, for a woodblock printing project called BIG INK, Wonson photographed the newly renovated diamond-paned windows at The White-Ellery house. “The White-Ellery house fascinated me; the dark sturdy exterior, the visible construction and layers of ornamentation left behind on the walls, paint and wallpaper still evident from long ago … carpenter marks on the attic beams, evidence of a human hand long gone. [The] House … is empty, yet it feels full of experience.”  Having finished the woodblocks, she decided to work toward putting a show together at the White-Ellery. The result is a series of three dimensional representations of household objects that comment on the contemporary relationship of the home and the world at large. “Over time, the link between home, object and their utilities has been degraded.… When everything is disposable, when there is always another, why should we care about what we have?”

Sarah Wonson was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts and graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2007 with a BFA in Printmaking.

About the White-Ellery House

The White-Ellery House, located at 245 Washington Street in Gloucester at the Route 128 Grant Circle Rotary, was built in 1710 and is one of just a handful of First Period houses in Eastern Massachusetts that survives to this day. Unlike other structures of this period, the largely unfurnished house has had very few interior alterations over the years. Stepping inside today, visitors enter much the same house they would have 300 years ago. The historic home is open on the first Saturday of the month from May through October as part of Escapes North 17th Century Saturdays. Parking is available off Poplar Street in the field behind the house. 

(Image left) White-Ellery, 2014, Woodblock print, 32″ × 36″; (Right) I Pine, 2014, Woodblock print, 24″ × 32″