2015
A collection of irregular handmade paper comprised of pulped abaca & found photographs (also pulped). This work was made during the Truth, Lies and Lore thematic residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Likewise, this work was made possible with support from the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Peter MacKendrick Endowment Fund for Visual Artists. This work was recently shown in Haunt, a Third Space Gallery exhibition curated by Christiana Myers.
Paper has been used to record and archive our truths (and our fabrications) for centuries. It is a surface designed to absorb histories, a tool for communication, to keep record; a document. We know paper as the technology rather than the message. A blank page normally acts as space filling, content separation or place saving.
I am regularly presented with offerings of abandoned mementos. While living in London, UK, I took a summer trip home to Saint John. There, while stopping by a local second-hand shop, I was gifted a vintage Moirs (a now defunct Halifax based chocolatier) box, full of mid-twentieth century negatives and news clippings from Saint John. This type of gift had been a common arrangement between us before I’d moved away. The shopkeeper explained that the box was basically worthless. Even so, unaware that I had moved away, he’d kept it for nearly a year until I returned from across the Atlantic to accept it.
I think of these types of gifts, boxes brimming with unknown people, reversed images and mementos which no longer trigger the memory they were once intended to as objects of misunderstood value. Items which have been kept/collected/found with no clear value and perhaps no clear purpose; and yet, we cannot bring ourselves to throw them away. I sometimes feel as though I am fulfilling some duty by relieving people of the weight of hanging onto them.
The process of making paper by hand is laborious. It involves the entire body. By choosing to pulp these found images I am both destroying and preserving—giving them a new function, a new space to linger. All the while, the act of making the paper—one sheet at a time—repeats itself into a ritual, the memory of which exists in my physiology, even if I can’t remember the individual images which make up each page.
Tracing Paper is part of a larger body of work (Pot of Gold) which includes silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes, drawing, collage, installation and text.
THANK YOU:
Banff Centre for the Arts and the Peter MacKendrick Endowment Fund for Visual Artists, Loyalist City Coin and Books in Saint John, Third Space Gallery & Christiana Myers.
(each sheet approx 11x17 inch)