I often find my stomach in knots over the smallest things—a colleague might be upset with me, I forgot about a deadline, I accidentally inconvenienced someone—and when it’s about larger issues, I find it almost crippling once my thoughts have had a chance to remind me over and over what I believe I’ve done wrong. This catholic school guild-framed anxiety has colored many of my days and kept me home from events I thought I otherwise might enjoy.
This work is comprised of a variety of paper-based material, framed by OSB, a material I have been working with throughout the semester as a proxy for a chaotic culmination of memories and experience that comprise the mind. In manually ripping up paper materials throughout the course of the month, I have spoken a similar language as the OSB but with materials that are closer to me. These include prints of various woodgrains I have produced over the same time period, “ink prints” of plaster sculptures I created to represent individual experience, packing paper from the paper and ink I purchased to create the prints, and writings on various experiences I’ve found myself over-worrying. Some of these papers blend together better than others, so some of their origins are more apparent than others… much like the memories that are stored in a mind and cause this stomach-wrenching rumination.
Rather than sit and think, I manually processed and pushed together these “thought” materials into an ultimately brittle rope-like form along the OSB, memories now frozen in time for the viewer in the same way a print draws an indexical image from an object at its current state. As memory is not linear and yet created along a timeline, the form snakes from left to right and ultimately ends, but implies a continuation with the exposed twine underneath snaking onwards.
May 2019