In this installation I began to digest a deeply emotional experience through making. It came to exemplify what my practice became during my time at Cranbrook, reflecting the intimacy of mind and body in the ways it binds together materials at odds with each other using a fragile skin of handmade abaca paper. This paper represents the fabric of the mind, memory, and life experience. It binds identities together as it binds the cement and steel, much like the mind synthesizes different emotional states at once.
Viewers are led through this empty apartment, occasionally being asked to duck, lean and tiptoe, creating a greater body awareness in the viewer and relating their experience back to mine. The creation of this piece was a dance between maker and materials.
Like the inner critic and the ways in which my experience affects me, this piece is all-consuming and ever-growing. The piece could go on forever and eventually make this space impossible to move through, but I’ve stopped it at a point of progress in the way papermaking draws out a mess of paper fibers from their suspension in water and freezes a clear moment of material in time.
April 2020