Cocoon Southern West Virginia by Kate Browne will be created in the counties of Raleigh, Boone, Logan and Mingo of West Virginia.

Cocoon is a 24 foot by 10 foot illuminated sculpture that people walk through and listen to the stories they’ve told Kate Browne in interviews. 

In West Virginia, Kate Browne’s interviews focus on the human complexities of communities in this hardworking region, where local people have had a long history with coal and have often experienced layoffs and migrations, pollution, loss of homes and epidemics, but also have a strong connection to community and standing up for individual rights. Kate Browne is interested in showing how many of the people in West Virginia take charge of a bad situation, organize to change it, and by doing so build their own infrastructure. 

It is important to the artist that these interviews and the Cocoon artwork connect the communities in Boone, Logan and Mingo, counties which the United Mine Workers planned to march through over 100 years ago on their way to Matewan to unionize and for their basic constitutional rights, but were violently suppressed by the authorities. Today, it is important to hear and document how this history of strikes and union organizing for human rights is part of the stories and decisions local people are making today, about water, schools, safety, health, homes, and reimagining the future of where they live. Cocoon gives voice to these American stories.

The recorded stories will be heard inside the Cocoon sculpture at the locations where the interviews took place, and Kate Browne hopes to publish a small book of the soundtrack of stories which will be given to the interviewees and available here on her website. After her two-year residency interviewing people in southern West Virginia, Kate Browne will first build the Cocoon in Beckley, where her partner The Beckley Art Center is located, before taking the sculpture on a trailer through Boone, Logan, and Mingo counties visiting the people at the places where interviews were made. At each stop, local people will carry small lights where they have written the names of West Virginia places important to them. They will attach these deep red lights to the sculpture's outer skin, and then walk through the illuminated 10-by-26-foot Cocoon sculpture, listening to their stories. The participants' portraits will be projected onto the exterior of the Beckley Arts Center, and onto the trees or buildings as the Cocoon travels through West Virginia.

Partner: Beckley Art Center

With the help of: Mine War Museum

Funders: Community Arts Project Support by West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History, and bykatebrowne

Dates:

• Performance-Installations outdoors: TBA

• Exhibition of Photographs at The Beckley Art Center: TBA

To know more about Cocoon, click here