NEW WORK

WHERE DOES AN ARTWORK BEGIN? Certainly not with the first brush stroke or that initial whack with a chisel; even searching further back--to when materials were gathered together with hope and intent--is not going far enough. Ideas, feelings, impressions, knowledge, experience, research, memories, sensations...they move through us like vectors of light, their stray particles clinging, drifting down, settling, waiting.

Sitting at my desk, I hear music from outside and instantly a day from ages ago (was I seven or eight?!) rushes back and there's an image of a white and green tent and a schoolyard and a game being played, maybe I'd even won a prize, and then I'm walking home and the light on the cathedral of trees is dribbled honey and I clutch at my paper bag.

The piece I recently completed (Shedding All That, 2020, 35" x 14" X 9"; Ceranchia apollina (Apollo silk moth cocoons from Madagascar), with linen covered wire), echoes my long-held curiosity with mummies, bog people, chrysalises (and transformations of all kinds), but also a fear of constriction, the suffocating limits I may never push passed, and of death. But I sensed while sewing that this piece was about so much more than all that and I was muted by my lack of clarity, by the swirl of it all inside, tiny wings beating furiously, searching for a new opening not even I could see.