forgive me

after karen green's husband, david foster wallace died (suicide), she couldn't work for a year. her first major art piece after her grief hiatus, was a forgiveness machine.

This article in the guardian explains it: This article in the guardian explains it: This article in the

This article in the guardian explains it: For a long while after that, she says, she couldn't make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. "The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long," she says, "with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell." The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto... In the end, Green didn't use the machine herself, except to put a few tester messages through. "I couldn't give it my full attention," she explains. "I was worried it wouldn't even work for the full four hours of the show's opening. I was also kind of a mess about surviving the opening itself. Seeing people, chatting. Not 'kind of a mess' – a mess. I couldn't imagine doing it." She thought she would come back to visit the machine after the opening but instead she drove to her new home, not far from where she grew up, and stayed there. The machine was overwhelmed, too; it couldn't process all the requests and was eventually dismantled. "Forgiving is never as easy as we would like," she says. "Apparently quite a lot of people cried."