Archive
2023
From July 2022 through January 2023, I participated in the GLEAN residency in Portland, scavenging materials from the city dump to create a body of work and culminating exhibition that took place at the Parallax Art Center in February 2023. In addition to the ecological drive behind this project, the experience necessitated trusting the process.
The overwhelming, melancholy environment and the magnitude of waste became more understandable as a processing of the pandemic years. I thought about processing, maintenance of life through all the mundane tasks we must do to keep up the business of living. How the essential yet often underappreciated work of women holds systems together. The legacy of artists Jo Hansen’s and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s performance, activism, and service was resonant.
I was drawn to the tactility of mundane materials like paper, string, and fabric. I contemplated traditional “women’s work” and embracing craft methods in my painting. I value care work and find a common thread in tending to my domestic and studio spaces, joining materials together, stitching, making marks on a page. Ideas can travel from one space to another, feeling can take visual form, labor can be honored and made manifest through the small gestures that accrue into the larger whole.
The resulting body of work is a collection of ghosts, versions of myself and others, time past. Echoes, vibrations, and entanglements. What is lasting or meant to last?
