Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home Denver artists
Alicia Bailey says, "The phrase “home is where the heart is” is one
that confounded me in childhood. Others seemed to think that home was a house
somewhere.
I asked my mother about it once, or maybe more than once. Her
response to my idea, if my home is where my heart is, then my body must be my
home, was an exasperated “Where do you come up with these ideas?”
The conviction that my home is the one that I carry with me
everywhere, my physical body, has stayed with me and continues to make sense. I
find comfort in the notion of my home as something that is wholly mine. A thing
while it can be shared, used or abused by others, exploited even, belongs to no
other. A place that will cease to exist at the same moment that I do.
The five books here reference the physical (Shedding), the sensual
(Burning Me Open), the psychological (Two Hearts), the spiritual (Mercy) and
all the above (Ab)."
Reader's Art 12 : Longing for Home
March 16-April 26, 2012
opening reception Friday, March 16, 7-10pm
Making art for more than thirty years gives me an abundance to draw from. However there are periods in development when a diversion from my usual practice is required to keep the work fresh and interesting. Even though it is not readily apparent in this collection of recent book sculptures they are influenced indirectly by visual memories of my trips to a local creek that runs slowly at a bend where trees and rocks block the flow. The creek is transformed from a stream to a wavy pond as the flow—not completely blocked—stagnates just enough for waves to bounce off the banks and obstructions to form wonderful patterns.
My first attempts at creating small sculptures by folding the pages of recycled books were experimental. Mathematics came into play only after I had folded a set of encyclopedias. Being material conscious, I switched to novels constructed of higher quality paper with deckled edges. The performance of waves from the resulting series of folds is beautiful as I use variations on a classical math problem, the so-called Paper Creasing Problem. More recently the waves are popping up due to parabolic curves. Each page is folded to a common point, the focus, with the edge serving as the straight line. Thus the collection of folds forms an arch-curve. Abounding waves emanate as the book is opened and spread out. I am discovering more waves as I delve into the problem of creating works that represent a perfect shuffle, as in playing cards. In mathematics a perfect shuffle is when a set of cards is divided into two equal piles and shuffled to interleave them perfectly.
