"My Piano: the Fragmentation of Memory" is a series of sculptures that deal with autobiography, narrative, family, music and time.

For my fourth birthday, I begged my parents for a piano so I could play like my adored nursery-school teacher. After reacting to the toy grand piano I received with the first tantrum of my well-behaved childhood, my father bought me a Sohmer spinet. When my Father died I discovered that he had bought the piano on time, and had spent 10 years paying it off—by which time I had stopped taking piano lessons. He never told me.

Following my Mother's death I lent the piano to friends but many moves over many years amid temperature and humidity changes had created much damage and it was apparent that repairs and reconstruction were not possible. When I offered it to a Settlement House, it was turned down on the grounds that it was too poor a piano for their students to practice on. I realized then that I couldn't part with my piano and the lingering sentiments it evoked. Images of my Father filtered through my mind whenever I thought about it, remembering that he had never told me whatever sacrifices he had had to make in order to keep up the payments, even when I gave up playing.

I make my sculpture from found objects: parts of obsolete machinery, pieces of odd-shaped, discarded metal, broken shapes that I transform and combine. Over a period of l½ years I disassembled the piano, filling my studio with boxes of piano parts--hammers, bushings, felts, strings, strange parts I couldn't recognize the use for-- even the mahogany case itself.

Some of the sculptures in the "My Piano" series are made solely of piano parts; others are combined with the odd metal shapes that relate to my earlier biomorphic steel sculpture. I wanted my father's voice to be heard in these pieces, but, as I was working on them I realized I also wanted to have a dialogue with him. He died when I was 15 ½, so I never had a chance to speak to him as an adult.

"My Piano 22" is the final piece in the series. The separated ivory and ebony piano keys and the fragmented piano leg are just that -- fragments of the conversations I wish I could have had with my father and the memories I have of him.

ANN SPERRY
2005