Touch

1945 Hiroshima-Permanent Human Shadow

The work I make never sprouts from preconceived notions of the effect of the final product or a concrete conceptual ground. They come from an innate, guttural obsession and need to create, to evolve and to transcend. “Touch” is constructed from, what I believe to be, the most transformative material-paper. As someone who focuses on process, what I find to be the most interesting part of this piece is that the plain butcher paper, an uncared for “trash” material, appears to be growing into “flora” when the process to make the piece was to carefully take away.

After digesting this piece and what it was to make it I find that it was the beginning of a lot of conceptual ideas that are of personal interest to me but also exist all over the map. Again, the idea of transformation seems to be the most apparent. More specifically, however, it is an attempt at transformation. The paper is mimicking what it believes to be flowers but in reality, has it all wrong. There is a certain perfection that comes from nature that is impossible to replicate. The flowers created in this piece are not perfectly symmetrical and none actually exist in nature. The butcher paper is hopeful in getting the job done and fails but nonetheless fails beautifully. Coming from nature, the paper is never able to go back to where it once came from or be what it once was.

Right before the beginning of this semester I came across images of shadows burned into walls from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. I believe that my interest in shadows came from this image and this piece was the beginning of that interest materializing into my artwork. There is a feeling of eeriness, awe and playfulness that comes from shadows. The idea of presence without actual presence is intriguing to me. In this piece, those thoughts lie in the tension that exists where the physical paper cut-out barely brushes its shadow.

I think this piece will continue to evolve for me the more that I contemplate and observe it and as you can tell, I don’t have a complete grasp on it yet. It is filled with fleeting, half-baked ideas and will hopefully never find one to ground it.