Mona Hatoum spent several months in the summer of 1996 at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, the last active Shaker community. Shaker religious tradition is known for embracing simplicity and utility, qualities that members espouse in part through their thoughtful design of furniture and other functional objects. While living alongside the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, Hatoum produced a series of rubbings by wrapping paper around Shaker-designed kitchen utensils and puncturing holes in the sheet. Here the paper retains some of the shape and pattern of the colander around which the sheet was wrapped.