In my most recent work, I have been using my own handmade paper. This paper gives my work an organic feeling from the beginning of the creative process and informs the piece as it develops. In these pieces, I have freed myself from more conventional means of making marks and forms. I use natural materials in the paper which expose initial shapes and dimensions before I begin to “draw” using thread, wool, wire, buttons, and collage some of which are materials that I have saved from older, unfinished pieces. Using these saved materials in conjunction with the handmade paper has become the core of my creative process over the last several years.
It had simply not occurred to me on a conscious level that saving everything connected to my work is the foundation of what I make. I use the old to create the new. While I work, I remember those pieces that did not quite fit together and how I can now take the past into the present which will become the future, uncovering new sources for further exploration of my creative process. My work is a reflection on the state of solitude necessary to create, as well as the place to which my subconscious returns to reconnect to the past or as Camus said, the “oeuvre, the life-work, is the journey back to the simple, great images on which the heart first opened.”