Deborah A Garwood

This site offers an introduction to my work.

Interdisciplinary Art Project: Evans Pond: A Long-term Study of a Single Place

• Evans Pond is part of the Cooper River Watershed in southern New Jersey.
• In 1997, I initiated an ongoing, interdisciplinary project to study Evans Pond as it is today.
• I photograph the woods and water. I study archival resources related to the site. I consult data. I collect stories about the pond from people.
• In this way I find traces of the site's own memory in the landscape itself, as it supports and responds to natural phenomena, and attracts patterns of behavior that flow around Evans Pond.
• Evans Pond is a recreational area and former agricultural millpond located in Camden County, New Jersey. The pond lies along the Cooper River as it passes through Haddonfield.
• Exploring the significance of Evans Pond through imagery, narrative forms, data, and analysis of visual artifacts, my project suggests that the site’s compromised environmental condition has been exacerbated by a loss of local cultural memory and fragmentation of governance.
• As a natural resource, Evans Pond is living laboratory that holds a connection to the region's past-- an archives of landscape.

Vintage gelatin silver print snapshot of two people posing in front of the dam at Evans Pond. Anonymous, undated. Collection Deborah A Garwood.