I started making these pictures about two years ago.
These pictures come from my desire to try a new way of making meaning from my experiences. Many include words on torn paper. Often, in difficult times, as I wrote in one of my essays, I wanted to shred words into bits and reassemble them. I felt like a pointillist constructing a collage, the kind where no individual color represents an eye or a nose until it discovers its place in the face it is creating. If a new countenance arose from these scraps, I wanted to meet her. She would be the next story I am becoming.
Ripping rice paper, inking prints, I feel connected to something ancient, even back to our ancestors recounting the hunt on the cave wall. We have always shared our adventures in pictures. Those excursions didn’t always turn out well. The broken spears, the wounded hunters, were sometimes drawn in blood. But the tribe needed to depict the enterprise, to pass it along. I feel that – more vulnerable and more connected – for sharing what’s true.
