Esther Cohen

I’ve been foraging and gathering for as long as I can remember random irrational objects, objects that evoke..  My mother started the process when I was very young – say six or seven.  She was born in Grand Forks North Dakota, and in one of those small stories that makes a life, she found herself married and living in a small factory town called  Ansonia where I was born. She loved to drive, claimed to have been driving since she turned 12.  Grand Forks she said was not a place with traffic. 

She would drive often, and I would accompany her. She liked thrift stores especially, although the world she lived in was all about NEW.  . 

Over the years I’ve collected a range of things starting with umbrella handles, but I have consistently searched for good words, and Interesting handwriting.  I would buy postcards for the messages, and for the shape of the letters of the strangers who wrote them.  I collected many postcards where the writer wrote We Are Here with a big black X on a picture of a motel, on a lake or waterfall. A week ago at a flea market in East Durham New York, I found a postcard that said, “Dear Joan, You Will Never Hear from Me Again.”  The writer, named Alan, did not say why.

One of my all time favorites is a long box I’ve been carrying around for years.  For the handwriting, and of course the subject: Box Old Envelopes, carefully handwritten.