Transcript

Hey y’all, my name is Diamond and this piece is about when I was, it’s autobiographical, it’s when I was a child I dropped a brick on a girl, an older girl, cause I had to be about 5 or 6 and I think she was in the double digits maybe. I dropped a brick on her above the swing set and it bounced off her shoulder onto her hand and I remember it was a lot of blood because her knuckles were pink lin a much different color of her skin and that’s how I knew I hurt her. But I don’t know what happened to me when I did that. I still don’t know what happened to me and if I ask my parents they don’t even remember that time. But I remember when I dropped the brick on her, and I think I did it just to do it. So, I started question consequence because sometimes people do things and there really are no consequences to their actions, at least physically that we can see.

And the playset was actually made of wood and rope but I wanted this playset to be more sterile and industrial looking. My grandmother worked, I think, in a steal factory or something along with metals. I think it’s very Chicagoan and industrial so that’s why I wanted it to be that way. There originally was no ladder, I just climbed on the swing set using the disc seating but I wanted to have a ladder in this piece to show that it’s intentional. And a ribbon around the brick just cause that’s a pretty image but it’s also violent, why is there a ribbon around a brick? There’s an undertone of violence, a lot of my work has undertones of that, cause that’s a day to day reality for a lot of people.

I wanted it to be oversized because as a child, things look a lot bigger than what they are. Especially as an adult, if you’re a very tall adult like myself, things that you thought were once huge aren’t that big when you grow up so I wanted everybody to feel overpowered by the piece.