Recently created at Dieu Donné Papermill. Grappling with writing a statement for these works. Please feel free to add your 2 cents, I am still rewriting.
I am a peripheral survivor of
the Holocaust. A cardboard box of
photographs passed on to me was filled with images of family members who
perished. No one in my family wanted it. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I
couldn’t throw it out but it seemed like a weight and responsibility to keep
forever. These works in paper
involve a melancholic memory and a sense of loss and contain some of those images.
In my works, my figures exist in
a handmade theater of recurring images and gestures. Keeping the repeated
images in flux enables discovery. Gestures combine and recombine through chance
or accident. That is an important
part of my process—referencing the randomness of fate—who lived, who
died. It also echoes my own experience with cancer.
Despite the current speed and
velocity of the world, I choose to be a maker of slow physical objects.
Fibers need to be beaten, pulled from water and couched in layers. With cotton,
linen or other plant materials such as flax or abaca, I engage with the
immediacy of working wet into wet as an integral part of the process. I layer
in cotton pulp, pigmented linen, and photographic fragments. I blow on charcoal or graphite dust,
and I shroud or reveal with a translucent skin of abaca, all integrated during
the wet.
This process also allows me to
access the past, particularly in revisited universal themes and to revisit the
collective suffering of the Jewish people. The iconography grows out of
the language of the body and from family
photographs reinterpreted. I thus consciously capture or undermine the
representation of heroic symbols, inverting the meaning by pairing photographs,
color and gesture to modify the role of these symbols. My work serves to
refute the Holocaust deniers and triggers memories that reunite my individual
experiences with those that expand beyond me.
Grappeling
Catching up. I spent the month of September at the Women's Studio Workshop. I had the paper studio residency all to myself and how great it was. WSW is an incredibly supportive place. Everyone is very encouraging no matter what you are trying to accomplish. Chris Petrone the studio manager and the interns were beyond great. Chris helped me wrestle with fibers I had never tried before. Tana the Artistic Director and co-founder got me using the vacuum press, a noisy novelty. The other artists in residence were also interesting. My apartment mate, artist Wei Jane Chir, was working on a book about organ harvesting. Interesting photos floating around when I got home at night... All of this helped me to create more than fifty works during my residency. Add all that to the glorious fall weather and wow—you should try it yourself. Read more about it in this article.
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