Home Again | Project Description

For Home Again, artists Avy Claire and Andrea Read gathered branches from the forest in Brooks, Maine for a weekend broom-making workshop and public sweeping action in Jersey City, New Jersey. The day after the workshop, participants used their brooms to sweep the sidewalk in front of a converted firehouse on Mercer Street. The intention of the project was to evoke the generations-old and soothing sound of the broom and sweeping as a domestic act versus the now ubiquitous sound of mechanized leaf blowers. By gathering material for the brooms from the woods in Maine, our intention was also to make visible, audible, and tangible the often unseen connection between urban and rural ecosystems.

This weekend event was followed by a public sweeping in a park in Jersey City, where participants brought their own brooms to sweep the pathways.

Brooks, Maine and Jersey City, New Jersey, 2009