The works in Close to Home are part of a series that considers the traces we leave on the materials we live with. Elusive marks, stitched trails and saturated, skin-like surfaces refer poetically to the tenuous and transitory nature of human experience.
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I am interested in placing, side-by-side, ideas that embrace the ordinariness of a blanket or other domestic cloth with ideas of place and time that maps suggest.
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I find beauty in the accidental marks left on the materials we handle daily. I build these pieces by continually fixing the mistakes: cutting out, covering up and adding a new bit, until it feels complete and beautiful. With this accumulation of attention and labor, sometimes the worst mistake yields the most beautiful surface.
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The works are constructed primarily from handmade flax, abaca and linen papers, with linen cloth and other materials that carry a variety of surface qualities. These constructed paintings allow me to explore, among other things, the essential properties of handmade paper and dyed cloth.