#amy lee sanford

Amy Lee Sanford, b. USA, 1972
Full Circle
Cambodia (2012)
Durational performance
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Roger Nelson writes for The Advisor:

Full Circle is an unusual artwork: a durational performance piece which will challenge and transfix both artist and audience. For six consecutive days, Amy Lee Sanford will sit amid a circle of 40 Kompong Chhang clay pots. Slowly and deliberately, she will break one pot by dropping it on the floor. She will then gather the pieces and meticulously glue the pot back together, binding the fragments with string and returning the remade pot to the circle. Over six days, all 40 pots will be broken and remade in this way.

“I create art in order to observe, examine and transform the lasting effects of war, including trauma, loss, displacement and guilt,” Sanford explains. The repetitive process of breaking and remaking the pots, mesmerising in itself, is also richly allegorical of ways in which Sanford – like countless Cambodians – has had to reconstruct her understandings of her life and family.

Raised in the US by her Swedish-American adopted mother, she was the only Asian in her neighbourhood. “My father wrote frequent letters to my mother and me, but after April 17 1975, the letters stopped coming… After many months, and ultimately years of silence from his end, my mother made the painful deduction that he had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge, especially since my father was a known intellectual and educator. I grew up with the belief that all of my family had been killed during the Khmer Rouge era, and that I was the only surviving member of my bloodline. After only 13 years of life with my (adopted) mother, she died suddenly when I was 15. That loss

the first time in 30 years, to meet my uncle and cousins. The three- week whirlwind visit was exciting, exhilarating, and exhausting.” Full Circle is not the first of Sanford’s works to address the cycles of trauma in both her personal biography and the nation’s history,but it is the first in this radical format.