My current body of work dives deeper into the painterly and sculptural potential of handmade paper with a series of intertwined, entangled and expanding abstract forms made from discarded and exhausted textiles that previously lived in domestic spaces in direct contact with bodies. I gather various colored cotton bedding and t-shirts from thrift stores, friends, family and my home. These discarded fabrics hold known and unknown stories of love, family, friendship and community. The fibers absorbed the common but unique private human experiences of sex, desire, love, sleep, rest, dreams, birth, illness, care-taking and death that accumulate to shape our collective experience that exist beyond patriarchal capitalism’s quantifiable measures of productivity. Removing the finished edges and boundaries of textiles by tearing apart and breaking down individual pieces of fabric into pulp symbolizes dismantling parts of the individual to meld with others.
Without the addition of any pigments or dyes, I make new color pulps by mix two or more differently colored pulped fabrics. Intermingled different colored fibers create vibrating fields of color and a metaphor for interdependence. I work with the pulped fabrics inside my studio and outside against built structures. In my studio I work slowly and intricately creating entangled and expanding shapes. Outside, I press pulp from interior worlds against exterior surfaces, brick walls and concrete. The soft private materials absorb and lift small fragments off of the more permanent surfaces, changing the hard public surfaces slowly overtime.
Photo Credit: Phillip Maisel
