With regards to my Fall plan, I predictably veered away from some of my initial ideas. My attempts to simplify has been a struggle both physically and metaphorically within the work I have been doing. Overcomplicated in all of my thoughts at the beginning of the Fall semester, simplifying is still very much something I want my work to come to but I found that perhaps that is exactly what needs to happen within the process of the work itself, complexity towards simplification.
I’ve always been interested in oxymoronic juxtapositions such as Macro/Micro, Complication/Simplification, Opaque/Transparent, Ethereal/Material, Observable/Obscured, Point Location/Network, Formula/Application.
My starting concept for this work began with my perception of an underlying structure or Grid which we use to understand the world and our environment and the process of entropy that occurs as a law of nature which tends to make things chaotic. As I was making this work, I felt it was fairly chaotic. As the work has been ongoing though I have been grappling with the idea of mending, repair, healing, preservation and binding and gathering.
In the material, there are layers, textures made with wax, fabric, plastic, rope, and images collaged onto the surface that are built upon a fundamental grid. The work has gone through several transformations, it has been through “some things”. It has been torn apart, put back together, sewn together, cut up, pinned together, painted and drawn over.
Craig Stockwell has helped me consider my work in new ways, as Juan has discussed with me previously, using video as a way to consider layering as a visual collage. So I began my experimentation with iMovie and layering imagery and voice. Here I was considering all of the connections to the grid and entropy. It basically documents my considerations while making this work and the process of making it. Specifically, I have shared the stages where areas in it that have been collaged, torn, pinned and pieced back together and document the complication underneath the final work. I ended with the question “How Do I Show The Mend?”
The “mending” that I referred to within my plan has so far been realized through the act of attempting to hold together or preserve the grid. I worked with encaustic to accomplish this. Wax being a preservative and a “glue” worked well for the idea while also bringing my work back to the media that I have worked with in the past. While I am still in the process of figuring out the “how to mend” idea, I am a healing practitioner and the figure eight pattern is significant here. I have been creating figure eights out of silk and laying them into the work although only pinned so far. For the mending I will continue using thread, Kibiso silk and encaustic is incorporated into the work. Somehow I think if I cut up the work further into separate pieces works too. Perhaps the painting would best be formatted as a series of vertical flags.
The bangles have been envisioned in a very different way than I had originally imagined for their use. The development here is that I have been considering some kind of flag, scroll or “manuscript” that speaks of Macro and Micro juxtapositions within some grids that are intact and some that are decaying. The macro and micro juxtapositions include having embroidered microscopic seed formations, embroidered subatomic particle collision, embroidered moon phase, embroidered constellations, etc. I will possibly include embroidered sculptural forms within these somehow. This will be what I begin to discuss with Patricia Miranda.
What you see here is all in some stage of “unfinished”. And I’m not sure that I want to continue this work in this particular manner but I am interested in using parts of my work past and present and future, to manipulate and incorporate them digitally and perhaps with animation but I have no idea how to really do that yet. Hopefully with Linkedin Learning and electives I will be able to explore this more fully and expand the possibilities. I still want to make physical work that can live side-by-side with this digital work though. One artist that I am inspired by and that I have been thinking a lot about is Arturo Herrara and how he uses his collection of “bits of work” to make collage works that get then translated into larger paintings.
I use “bits” as well, but am not comfortable with the end result yet.
Important readings that I seem to be in line with so far are The Poetics of Space by Bachelard, The User’s Guide To Entropy by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Art and Textile: Fabric as
