La Famille Bouteille, paper, ink and adhesives
From the Inside Out
As I gardened this morning, pulling out well-entrenched wild roses and over-exuberant euphorbia stalks, I thought about newsletters. In some ways, writing one feels like adding to the overgrowth in my garden—there are so many newsletters, so many grabs for our collective and waning attention. But I value this exchange with you, and I want to share what I've been learning in the studio.
I've been practicing working from the inside out—following what draws me in rather than what I think I "should" do. For the last three months, what drew me was a workshop called "Texture" led by British artist Claire Benn.
The premise: take handwriting in its simple form and modify it in myriad ways—elongating, stretching, and squishing text, diluting ink, layering color. A class on texture from A to Z. I reveled in it, luxuriating in rich black ink, the slow bleed of homemade inks, and the blossoming of letters when water hits the page.
For the online exhibit, I wanted to bridge what I've learned with my collage practice. How? I returned to making paper vessels. By constructing the vessels with the pages of text, I made three-dimensional collages. After several weeks of work, I ended up with a family of 19 vessels.
What a relief—to spend uncounted time simply making until what I envisioned came into form.
Réunion de Famille, paper, ink and adhesives
Despite Everything, Monoprint collage with vintage papers, 9 x 12”
Through Lines
In another part of my studio, I've continued work on the Through Lines series. These pieces hold two forces in tension: the quiet endurance of nature and our restless drive to build—a drive that, paradoxically, threatens the very ground beneath us. Using vintage Fortune magazine pages with botanical monoprints and ink, the collages reflect the fragile balance between what sustains us and what we construct.
Flux, Monoprint collage with vintage papers, 9 x 12”