Foreign Aid, Part A (one of six)
Pit-fired ceramic with Braille text, 7.5" x 6" diameter | by Ingrid Lilligren
Copyright © 2003 Ingrid Lilligren | All Rights Reserved
<< previous page

Artist's Statement:
(Part A): Gwen Ifill recently interviewed the Carters on PBS. Jimmy Carter made the remark that for every dollar of (Part B): Foreign Aid the U. S. donated, Norway was giving seventeen. I decided to investigate. (#3): What I found was illuminating. The U.S. is dead last of 22 industrialized nations in foreign aid donations relative to gross domestic product. What a shame. The internet has thousands of sites with statistics, most of them quite alarming. (#4): I once read a definition of beauty as a purely aesthetic response, a disinterested observation, objective and objectifying. Statistics too put us at a remove. How can we put a face on the numbers we read about daily? (#5): How much cultural and personal identity have we invested in the remove that disinterested beauty and compressed data provides? (#6): If we define beauty to include engagement, could or would our relationship to the world and its issues change?