I’ve been a big fan of Big Red & Shiny for a long time, so I was very pleased to meet Anulfo back in March. I’m honored he asked me to contribute to Inside Out.
It seems like an unusual time (and, hopefully, a rich one) for me to be writing about my process. As Anulfo said, in the middle of my residency on BR&S, I will be picking up and moving across the country to start my MFA degree at San Francisco Art Institute. I’ve also been in the middle of a transition within my work for the past several months, which, for a long time, felt like a nasty creative block. At some point, however, I realized that it’s not that I have a lack of ideas, it’s that I’m trying to re-evaluate what’s important to me. What aspects of my studio work are part of the very fabric of my being, and which ones seem necessary, but are actually expendable and maybe even irrelevant?
In thinking about transitions, I perused my studio looking for unfinished projects. A few of them are below. I’m curious about what makes us start and stop, and how these idea fragments contribute to progress.
Every so often I go back to making books you can't open, but I'm not sure I've finished any.
Paper fragments I was trying to obscure with thread.
Layers and layers of paper.
I recently spent a day cutting out paper houses. They were littered around my studio for months- this is the only one I have left.
Perforated paper, punched with a sewing machine, and hand-sewed.
I made these out of scraps of paper that were too small to do (it seemed like) anything else with.
More stacked paper, sandwiched between layers of PVA.
