Reconnecting 

The time and space to be me in week 4 and 5 of my Chicago adventure in the summer of 2023 has been irreplaceable.  During this time, I have spent a lot of time sitting in my studio that is located in the basement of 280 building of the SAIC campus. However, it is not like any normal basement – right by my studio space I have a rather large skylight that leads to the busy city outside. I can notice when it rains, a shift in the clouds, and for better or worse the sound of the most recent Nascar races.

Within this space I have am able to claim silence and repetitive action that I have taken on almost as a daily ritual of cutting and weaving paper. Although this may seem like something you did in grade school art classes it has become something that has allowed for me to move through my thoughts and my own practice. Why have I spent the past year making materials and not know what to do with them? Why are they blue? Why am I harvesting at the proper times to create the movement within the pieces? I have said it once and I will say it again – being given the time and space to think and produce for myself has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my adult life. So, how did I start to tackle these random questions that kept coming up on what to do with the eco materials I have spent so much time creating?

Research, writing and putting the pieces directly in front of me so that I was able to confront them (in the healthiest manner possible).

After weeks of this daily action of writing and researching it would be so simple for me to fall back onto “it is process”, “it is repetition”, “it is exploration of materials”. I do not want to discount how I learn and why I love what I do, but if I were to fall back on that it would be clear that I have learned nothing about myself or these materials over the past couple weeks. The fact of the matter is I am healing. I relate all of this process of how everything moves and flows with the word enjambment....although I am probably taking some liberties with it to allow for it to fit towards me. Within research I was able to start reducing it to my own life philosophy and what I relate to as a human. I was able to boil it down to three things: color, synchronicity, and last but never least – process.

A lot of my research took down the path of color as healing. Now I teach a color theory class (because let’s face it…printmaker’s do it best) and we touch a little on color psychology, but I have not fully tapped into the color as healing. After reading a lot of essays and researching the origins and technical side of blue – I landed on the fact that this was my subconscious taking care of me when I genuinely could not take care of myself. To put the paper in the logwood or black bean vats every month connecting with the dried plant material that was gathered it allowed for a calm to wash over me that I was not experiencing in my everyday life due to certain traumas. The process allowed for me to fall into a repetitive action that I so dearly love. The research gave me to strength to link up my own healing process with my action of creating and through this I was able to fall back and genuinely think about synchronicity within life and my own praxis as an artist.

To bring it into this week I have started to understand how the weaving of the paper and intentionally picking what goes together and mixing of the patterns is also a part of the healing. As I further explore this idea all I can say is I am open and here for it. Thank you for this time and opportunity to find myself and remember exactly who I am. The best advice I can give for this week so keep moving and be open.