2021
In the thirty years I have taught at PDS I have saved the remnants of student art-making— used palettes, scrapings from empty paint containers, ink blot papers, the ink pens made from sticks, the shavings from pencils, abandoned sculptures, color studies, broken blades, even, when I moved to a new studio, pieces of the concrete floor covered with years of spills. I’ve been using these materials to make artworks over the years, but for this show I have focused on making a whole body of work from these material fragments of the art making process. I’ve always been interested in working with what is generally unvalued as detritus—throw away, endless particulars of stuff all around us—and either creating a formal structure over the work or shifting into a different form of representation: from paint to photograph to tapestry or from film to still photo to paint, emphasizing change and process. Similarly, in my photographic work I have not been as interested in the iconic photograph—but rather in gathering thousands of images of the particular, ongoing, repetitive processes of our lives.
In this show a combination of these methods are at work: large photographic blow ups of a color palette and of an ink blot paper; a large tapestry of an ink blot paper; a grid of small photos of hundreds of palettes or ink blots juxtaposed with one original one; color block designs made from arranging color studies and photographing them, then making them into tapestries; works made from peeling the dried paint off of the palettes and jars and making new abstract works; twenty-five year old abandoned sculptures left out in the weather; concrete floor blocks with the peeled off paint; red pencil shavings on canvas; a film of broken blades and used wax merging; torn paper pieces.
As I leave teaching after forty-odd years, my hoarded remnants take on a new meaning for me as material traces left behind of the many students I have taught, of their often amazing talents, their curiosity, eagerness, and affection. They have taught me endless lessons about life and art, and I will miss them.
