Gallery Submissions

The folded circles

I've spent the better part of the past two weeks working on a couple of submissions for The Morgan's inaugural juried exhibition. Pieces had to either be done on paper or consist of at least 50% paper. Each of my pieces were made of paper attached to canvas, and while they were made of the same material, the two couldn't be more different.

The first piece is called Blank Botanical #1. I folded many hundreds of these small paper circles and strung them onto linen bookbinding thread, and then I sewed the strands onto a plain white, 2ft by 2ft canvas. The result is overwhelmingly sculptural. The more strands I sewed onto the canvas, the more textured and layered it became. And although the pieces that I attached were all white, I used different shades of white to get a variety of tones in the piece.

A detail of the finished Blank Botanical #1 piece

The strips all prepped and ready to be attached to the canvas

The second piece consisted of hundreds of little strips of paper. I drew repetitive lines all over these pieces and then glued them onto a long, narrow white canvas in rows. The shape of the canvas itself is similar to the shape of the pieces of paper, and also to the shape of the lines I drew on the paper. I call it Line Study #3 and it's a design I've been working with for quite a while now and plan on continuing with. As you can see, a lot of my work deals with repetition and my techniques tend to be pretty labor intensive. The Blank Botanical piece took somewhere around 40 hours of work and I estimate my Line Study piece took about 15 hours. I often joke that I don't like to work on anything that's not obsessive. Most people who see me work on these things just think I'm nuts because, to them, that kind of tedious task would drive them crazy. But it's just the opposite for me. I find the work to be meditative, and for this reason I find the method to be as important as the final result.

Anyway, after all that I hope at least one of the pieces gets into the show. I love The Morgan and it's because of them that I work so much with paper lately. It would be a real honor to have a piece of mine included in their first juried show and, let's be honest, the exposure would be great. I'll keep my fingers crossed.