My work is a diaristic look at my routines, surroundings, garbage, and found materials. I make paper pulp from discarded drawings, junk mail, and a stack of New Yorker magazines left over from the pandemic that have been collecting dust and staring back at me. I want to track these moments where things become characters or crusty friends, personified by the time I spent with them, or the associations they bring up.
Cartoons, abstract painting, printmaking, digital textures, sustainability, and nature are visual influences. Paper pulp acts as a glue but also looks like plops of an ambiguous substance. Using paint as a skin over paper pulp surfaces, the topography of pulp has a plastic-pressed-over-waves feeling, which looks digital. Paint acts like a stalactite drip, mimicking growth. Graphic scalloped edges, flowers, clouds, and other cute shapes frame materials that are more earthy, like handmade paper, or associated with waste, like plastic.
Though I am using mostly found materials rather than purchasing new, I am aware that my practice has no significant climate impact. There is something crazy-making about having “sustainability” as an undercurrent in the work and simultaneously watching it fail in my practice, illustrating that one small art practice by one perfectionist doesn’t make an impact. I am also interested in lifestyle choices and wellness culture, spirituality influencers on Instagram, corporate greenwashing and the promise, widely marketed, that if we could just minimize our personal carbon footprints everything would be fine, justifying delaying systemic changes.
