Dwelling is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding provided by the Boston Foundation for Architecture and individual donors.

Climb Amy Walsh Sexton’s Room mixed media Treehive mixed media Climb mixed media Three small dwellings, nestled in hidden spaces, offer glimpses of the character and experience of imagined occupants. Walsh imagines spaces for poets Anne Sexton and ee cummings, both buried at Forest Hills. Sexton’s Room is tucked into a space at the end of a stone wall. Treehive is perched in the branches of a small crab-apple tree. The third dwelling hides in a niche formed when a large canopy tree healed. It refers to the stubborn persistence of what has gone, the history of a person or place manifested in the physical traces it leaves behind. Artist's Statement Homes and buildings offer more than shelter; they are containers for our memories, dreams, desires, and struggles. Sexton’s Room Living in a culture that required women to conform to strict ideals and conceal their struggles, Anne Sexton defiantly beckoned us inside the most intimate realities of her life at home and in mental hospitals. These rooms were both prisons and places where her imagination was released through writing. Treehive e.e.cummings showed us that the “architecture” of language – its shapes and structures – are not as immutable as we usually imagine. If a poem is a structure, his collapses and rebuilds itself, resisting the laws of gravity and physics. Climb Our dwellings are a part of us, and when they disappear, traces linger in our memories. In cities, structures that have vanished leave “ghost marks.” These remnants of dwellings suggest stories from the past, just as a tree’s healed wound signals a historical event in the tree’s life.

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