Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Burning, Smoking, Smoldering

 The central images are from photographs printed on bond paper 24"x 36".  They were laid onto handmade paper pulp in a water bath. The images are from a large ball of torn muslin, previously used in an installation, and burned on a backyard fire. The globe shape and the approach of climate disaster on our home globe compelled the creation of these works, best hung together.




Playing with Collages

                                                               Collage Play #1


Collage Play #2



Collage Play #3

Collage Play #4




Collage Play #5



Collage Play #6



Collage Play #7













Monday, February 21, 2022

Working with Red

 I have made red paper, which is unusual for me.


I was compelled to use red because of my alarm about what is going on in our environment. Trees are being destroyed by wildfire and misuse and I don't know what to do about it. So I make art.

"Alarm"

    "Distress"






Thursday, February 10, 2022

Cotton

 This is a series about cotton as a crop.  In thinking about cotton here I am thinking of slavery, exploitation, greed and the need to talk about this. The threads are made of spun paper. 


Black Cotton


Red Cotton




Green Cotton




Cotton and Dinner Conversations


Cotton








Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Trees










These works are made of handmade paper, with bark inclusions from eleagnus, a forest invasive. The work includes spun paper thread. Uncertain Ground Between Steel and Tree includes a steel rebar on the left. 

Uncertain Ground 

Between Steel and Tree


                       Bound Tree




Fire Tree





  





Ghost Tree

                      

 





Saturday, January 8, 2022

An Essay

WORKING WITH PAPER

 

Papermaking is a wet process of transforming plant fibers into the familiar dry, receptive surface.  Paper, like many things, is a process before it is a product.  My art streams from the process which flows through two conceptual branches. 

 

One branch runs through paper’s origins in nature, and through thoughts about the natural environment within which our lives are embedded. I grow my fiber. The bark of paper mulberry is stripped, the inner bark is cleaned, and then it is cooked, beaten and formed on a screen. Engagement with nature is essential to us all, and even small things, like fibers have big influences. Because of small things with huge environmental importance I have a body of work that was formed, in part, through the activities of insects - honeybees in one case, and red wiggler composting worms in another. The processes of the insects were essential to the final artistic product. 

 

The other branch runs through the pages of human culture. Paper is written on. Paper supports history, stories, musical notation, drawings, art…and has other more mundane uses. In this case the cultural burden resided primarily on my southern grandmother's journal. When I got that journal, it had been shredded, as she wished. I turned the pages back on themselves and they disappeared again into paper pulp.  I used the material remains to create art specific to my grandmother. In later work l looked back at that work and at family as a process of cultural inheritance moving forward to influence our present. I reworked some of the old pieces and pressed forward with new work looking at current racial issues entangled in my own southern heritage.

 

These two conceptual branches flow together somewhere between the hard realities of natural disaster and the disastrous realities of white supremacy - the latter because of the implications of race related to my own present, and the former because no matter how peaceful and cyclical the process of paper making may be, we, as humans, are slamming headlong into a confrontation with the cycles of nature.

 

 



Thursday, February 25, 2021

Two silhouettes


The two pieces I will talk about are similar in material, handmade paper, but they came from two different places in my thinking.  
The first set of images are of a piece called Shadow and Tree The narrow scroll down the middle was cut from the initial long piece of paper. and woven with paper thread.  The shadow drawn on the whole scroll is from a tracing of my elongated shadow on the ground in the late afternoon.  I was thinking about the tall verticality of the central woven scroll as a tree cutting through the human shadow. The human shadow on this planet is menacing the survival of our species. But the planet, and the trees, will outlast us.  The scroll continues past the shadow and the story can (and I hope will) change.
The second set of images are from a piece called Anticipation. The silhouette is from a photo of a young girl waiting patiently. The piece is quilted with the word WAIT sewn four times.
I was thinking about the long history of black descendants of enslaved peoples in this county being told over and over again to wait, we white Americans aren't ready for that (many 'thats') yet. Society (white society) will be ready later.

I have yet to tie together the threads of nature and racism in my art making. I know there are many connections, but here they are just side by side.

Shadow and Tree



   









   

    








Anticipation