Before all this Ends
I made the piece above after my grandfather died. In the space between his passing (2/19) and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic here in Maine (3/20). I just named it now but it seems to fit.
Always an exploration
I never name what I create, and am finding doing so right now to be quite serendipitous. I like playing. Making art, especially the visual kind, feels just like that to me. I don’t love this piece, but it reminds me how much fun I have making things.
The space you left behind
This comes from my visual journal. Again, in the period just before and after my grandfather died. I come and go from these pages, where some finished pieces live, beside other ideas whose seeds have yet to soak long enough before they are ready to sow.
A watercolor print I made, sometime in my 20’s. It never actually made it onto the page… I was too attached to the way it looked on the plexiglass plate. Over the years it’s developed scratches, the scars of living. I think I made the right choice. Let’s call it, “Naming my ghosts.”
The Scar
What do I say. This is the centrifugal force in which all my fascinations, discoveries, obsessions, repressed emotions, and memories spin in their tiny orbits. It’s the winter of1998, I am newly nineteen years-old. This is my second surgery. There will be three more. I have just found photography and feel like I’ve found a portal into understanding, and capturing, everything that has always called to me.
Scar print
I was never a very good printmaker. Lack of skill and confidence in experimentation, and rigid ideas of what I wanted an idea to look like, often kept me stuck. But I kept at it for several semesters at college. The last several months before I graduated, I got into collage. Because I went to a very liberal arts school, these collages became a part of my coursework. I didn’t get a great grade, but I found another true love. A medium that spoke to my scattered pieces. The above print was one of my obsessions: how to represent, in various ways, my scar. The photograph I took shown above this print, was my inspiration.
Returning to the root or “Oh Rumi… what do I say of my fierce love for you and your magnificence?”
I made this college when I was staying in a crisis stabilization unit in May of 2021. I was struggling with the almost death of my father, who spent March through September of that same year in the hospital. In May he was still in the ICU. And I was almost five months off the five psychiatric mediations I had been weaned off of in January (under the care of a psychiatrist in a psych ward). It was a tumultuous time. I was both shedding layers of the self I had worn for years, and beginning the process of returning to the root of who I was. Who I have always been.
my body speaks 