Light Quilts (2020)
installation and preparatory drawings
Paper tangibly investigates storytelling through the way in which it holds a memory of its own. From the making process and its created form, paper provides physicality for memory, loss and nostalgia. Fragmentation, whether or not intentional, can alter these stories, which is a perfect reflection of the porous brain and its manipulations of memory. Contradictions in memory and the selective memory have led me to consider the relationship between memory and dream. Writing, video, soundscape, drawing, painting, and paper installation have helped me learn more about this relationship.
The history, rituals, and traditions behind delicately crafted objects fascinate me. I am interested in how layering craft into creation can shift an object’s significance, granting it value or rendering it as obsolete to a viewer.
What is remembered, forgotten, and misremembered are carefully stitched into Light Quilts. The history, craft, tradition, and storytelling that a quilt can hold for an individual as well as their subsequent generations is acknowledged. By tearing handmade paper and piecing it into patchworks, there is a heavy emphasis on physical place and intentionality. The open spaces and holes in the quilts relate to memory’s capability of abstracting and fragmenting personal history as it sieves out of the brain.
Videos dance through paper, serving as clipped memories, pasted together to become something different, to become something new.
Light Quilts (2020, installation video)
light, ink, and colored pencil on handmade paper from moving boxes and the invasive Albizia julibrissin from the artist’s rental property