Thinking about systems – about how complexity unfolds over time, about non-hierarchical, decentered actions, about porous boundaries – led to significant changes in the way I use drawing in my work. Erupting first as a kind of anomaly, the net pattern became important to the work as both a process and a structure. In the net drawings, an unpredetermined field or form emerges incrementally from many very simple decisions and actions. Drawn and cut by hand, the work mines shifts between two dimensional illusion and physical space.
Consistent across this work is an engagement with the language of drawing – as a way of figuring, as a way of paying attention, as a way of enacting. Drawing – sometimes visible, sometimes not – is the animating force. Consistent too are questions about how we are embedded and implicated in our environment, as subjective bodies that have emerged from, are contingent on, are hosts for and actors within, complex organic and inorganic material systems. How are we suspended between agency and absorption?
"The entanglement of matter and meaning calls into question this set of dualisms that places nature on one side and culture on the other." Karen Barad
Working with the same basic logic, the work has been operating on several registers. First, in large, cut drawings (like the For Now pieces), the paper becomes the drawing itself, and the work grows and spills into real space. The reflected color from the backsides of some of these drawings led to the Sky drawings, rectangular drawings on the wall where reflected light from net fields activate the space between two layers of paper. Finally, the smaller Tangle drawings explore different kinds of entanglements - nets ruptured and repaired, grown together, grown apart, inseparable.
The current Matter Project seeks to more clearly ground the work in the material world, using large digital prints from cellphone photographs as a way to activate the surface of the paper at the start. Animal fur, eroded Styrofoam, mud, lichen-covered asphalt – the mixed up stuff all around us. Anchored in the material world, the image field becomes a site to draw with or through, the drawing opening and dislodging the image. The resulting pieces are a composite of different registers - your perception assembling the reflected light, the cut paper and remnants of the image field into a complex and unstable whole.
