White Drawings
“And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream”
-Tom Waits
Memory and autobiography are selective, malleable, and yet constant. Different narratives overlap from one work to the next. I use numerous mediums concurrently, always searching for what might best express what I’m trying to communicate.
My process is one of contradiction. I sometimes make an entire drawing only to cover over it with pieces of tape, labels and paint. I manipulate the surface by folding it and ripping it. Sometimes I finish a piece only to realize it is not communicating what I want to say. I attach sculptural elements and then remove them. Eventually, I work back into the surface with solvents and sandpaper to reveal part of an earlier narrative trajectory - sometimes several. Nothing is ever really lost. A story becomes more interesting when it has suffered damage. When it has a history.
I am trying to figure out how we reckon our own lives. For me, I suspect it is a process similar to painting – things become covered but never truly disappear. You work in the losses and impermanence of life because it cannot be undone. And, there is something respectful about acknowledging all of it - the opposing forces of injury and repair, memory and forgetting. They are inextricably tied to one another.