David Phillips crossed the ocean to spend five weeks as the Prairie Ronde Artist Resident in Vicksburg, Michigan. A trained architect living in London, Phillips is a landscape artist, leaning to the abstract. He will be exploring the former Lee Paper Company mill and its adjacent 80 acres of property along with the historic town of Vicksburg. Phillips anticipates creating somewhere between 100 and 200 postcard-sized images while in Vicksburg as part of his art project.
“I’ve seen the mill from a distance, and I looked at it online before I came here,” Phillips says. “In my career, I originally practiced as an architect, and I moved into fine art from there. I’ve always been interested in buildings and structures. I think all my work is in response to the landscape and the things that are put into landscapes, whether they are buildings or other sorts of objects, and how they change our perception or understanding of them.”
In preparation for this residency, Phillips has purchased hundreds of historic postcards of the Vicksburg area.
“I’ve been fascinated with postcards most of my life,” he says. “It’s obviously a diminishing medium for communication, but it’s the way that people combined messages with images and how they would record how people thought about places. I’ve been on eBay, and I’ve bought up quite a number of postcards from Vicksburg from a hundred years ago and earlier. Most of the buildings are still around. It shows often what people are proud about or how people saw their environment.”
Phillips plans to arrange the postcards in a grid and combine them with his own reflections in his artwork. He will be on site at the mill from March 10th to April 15th. Visit the Prairie Ronde Artist Residency website for information on upcoming public showings.
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