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When did you return?
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JH: For the next two weeks we were allowed, sporadically, into the loft to collect things we needed. We had to be accompanied by a policeman or National Guardsman, and were generally allowed 5-10 minutes to gather things up. Once, it took me two hours to find someone to take me in.
On Sept. 26, we were allowed to return home. For a while thereafter, we were in the ''Red Zone'', fenced in with the site, and had to show identification to bring groceries home. Despite the horror of being there, we experienced great camaraderie. All the neighbors were so happy to see each other again. Once we had returned permanently, I was inexorably drawn to the subject, and began a routine of circling the ruins a couple of times a week, obsessively recording what I could see. |
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When did you turn your project into a book?
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JH: As I drew, snatches of poetry and prose would come to mind. I would take the sketches back to the loft and turn them into watercolors. I sent some to friends and family, just so they would have some idea of what it was like down here.
There are close to 100 pictures in the series, and I chose 65 as the chronological record. I also preface the record with a few images from the ''window a day'' paintings made prior to September 11, to give a stronger sense of how irrevocably things changed. I put the pictures into a scrapbook, with some of the poems, and sent copies out at Christmas. This is a personal experience and an historic record. I want to communicate what I saw for this and later generations. |
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You have chosen verses by some of the world's greatest poets to accompany your work — Wordsworth, Poe, Eliot, Dante, to name a few. How did you choose these works?
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| JH: Mostly, they were bits I knew. Friends sent some to me when they had seen the pictures. The poems were comforting in that they remind us that this is not a new experience in the world — there is a universality of feeling that has existed through the ages. The words give another perspective with which to deal with the act, the ruins, the loss and the sadness. |
| How has life in Lower Manhattan changed? |
JH: The most obvious change is in the light, the weirdness of the perspectives, the views no one has ever seen. To everyone in and around New York City, the World Trade Center was a powerful reference. For people who live and work here there are moments when we look up, and are reminded, piercingly, what has happened. |
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Jean Holabird was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grew up in Chicago, and studied at Columbia University, The Art Students League, and Bennington College. As with many of her fellow artists, she fell in love with New York City. In 1975 she moved into her present studio on Warren Street, in lower Manhattan, four blocks north of the World Trade Center. |
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