I’m tremendously excited to be part of this project. Fung Collaboratives and the Atlantic City Alliance have given me the opportunity to create new work in a new medium and a new genre, as well have one of my existing sculptures realized in an entirely new context.

The commissioned pieces, “The Flood Suite”, will be a comprised of three identical sets of highly sculpted garden furniture. These pieces are inspired by the ornamental cast iron garden furniture that were particularly popular in the early 20th century, and which continue to be in production today.

Each set (three sets of two chairs and a loveseat) will be connected by a visual through line, or a “high water mark”, flooded with the jumbled detritus of daily life. This disorderly motif was, of course, inspired by Hurricane Sandy, as well by the images of upheaval and confusion that have become familiar in the wake of the latest hurricane, flood, tornado, or tsunami.

As furniture, this project will provide a place to sit down and enjoy the city, the park, and the view. As sculpture, these pieces will offer a commentary on how our perception of our relationship to nature has shifted from one of bucolic pleasure and harmony to that of anxious anticipation and imbalance.

In addition to the newly commissioned work, “Mama’s In the Arbor” (2013), will be installed at the cornerstone of the park.In many ways, this piece was created as a personal response to the Late Gothic sculpture that has fascinated me since I was a child. As a sculptor, I wanted to try my hand at creating something that complex, overwhelming, and mysterious, without succumbing to nostalgia, or anachronism. In a very direct way, my goal was to create in viewers the same feelings I have standing in front of a carved wooden altarpiece from the Middle Ages; that powerful frisson between the seductive pleasure of the image and the profound, and potentially unsettling, implications of the narrative.Jedediah Morfit

Jedediah Morfit graduated from Connecticut College with a degree in Religion Studies, and spent the next 6 years working as a freelance fabricator and illustrator. As an illustrator and designer, his work appeared in magazines that ranged from Forbes to Mother Jones, and his commercial client list included Microsoft and Coca Cola.

He received his MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005,adjoined The Richard Stockton College the following year. He was a Fellow at the Center For Emerging Visual Artists, in Philadelphia, from 2007 to 2009, awarded a New Jersey Council On the Arts Fellowship for sculpture in 2009, and won the Dexter Jones Award

for Bas Relief from the National Sculpture Society in 2011 and 2012. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children.