Today marks 1 month of isolation.
I’m working on a new iteration of these building blocks of modular origami pieces in my apartment – currently dying some assemblages with pigments I’ve hoarded for years. These assemblages will be a single layer within a denser sculpture, but on their own (or on this roasting rack, drying in the sun) they remind me of cloves, of an oddly formed and washed up shell, or a child’s drawing of a day star.
Working with paper allows my gears to keep whirling in this oddly generous and anxious time. It also has me thinking about dream states. The mix of connotations within our waking and sleeping selves seems potently tethered as I pace the same space for weeks and weeks. This mixture of dream and life, of an unplottable, unplaceable object or structure of natural pattern, that I’ve relentless touched on in my work at OSU, speaks about an absurd familiarity. I’m still obviously finding the language for it, and I am leaning into it more and more. Is it nightmaric play? Is it the uncanny valley? Is it impossible growth? Is it a series of miscopies in our brains as we sleep and our days are filed away into long-term memory banks as we dream in detail of a place that no longer exists? Is it the same beautiful, horrible error that caused a sequence of DNA to miscopy between two entities, jumping a disease across species and within months shutting down the entire world? There is this tension, within the micro and macro, within the rippling, and within the eventual mirroring, that shapes our conscious and subconscious. Perhaps we only understand that tension in duality- our waking brain and sleeping brain digests different aspects.
Or maybe, for now, I am just folding paper in my apartment.