Overlook Park 1-5

Taken at Overlook Park in Glynn County, Georgia, these photographs evoke Park McArthur’s temporal and spatial relationship to the artist Beverly Buchanan, whose site-specific sculpture Marsh Ruins was permanently installed in the park in 1981, more than 30 years prior to McArthur’s visit. Marsh Ruins is located near both the commemorated site where the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier wrote his elegiac ‘‘Marshes of Glynn’’ (1878), and Saint Simons Island, where in 1803 a group of Igbo people sold into slavery collectively committed suicide by drowning. No historical marker commemorates that event.

The five photos, each taken with a camera placed on McArthur’s lap as she circled the wooden picnic table in her wheelchair, meditate on the dual meaning of the park’s name—“overlook”—as both an act of forgetfulness and a place from which to survey a landscape. Several of the photographs also enact McArthur’s own spatial relationship to the site through the use of low camera angles.