You know that moment when you have an idea and it hits you like a rocket, after you’ve been in your home for a little too long (say a week), but you’re working on something else so you put the idea on the backburner, where it is meant to simmer and wait but instead it grows and shifts and morphs until you can’t really grab hold of it properly anymore? But, you have to get it out, it needs to come out, so it does – and it is this. I am calling this a sketch of sorts, because this idea is not finished, I just needed to get my hands around it again.

Circles – thinking directionally, there is no progress made by following a line around and around. I’ve been drawn to spirals in the past year, partially because they take the movement of a circle and elongate it so that there is a sense of direction from a certain perspective; a sense of progress. As I spend this time in my home I find all the small senses of progress in my day (a meal, a conversation, a bit of making, a meal, a sleep, etc) are gumming together in my psyche.

All these looping creative and practical daily gestures are spiraling and overlapping; I am circling myself.

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.

Rules

making the rules up as we go
ruling over the areas that we know
placing order where there is none

fabricating reliance through routines
by telling stories with our bodies
and also by repeating them.

I’m not sure I hit the nail squarely, but I’m interested in what flourished out of a rough notion I had-

System Preferences – humanizing a technical term that is so familiar it feels absent, like your own name. But, when a stranger says it, or someone steps into your space, the distance between you and them expands, and evaporates, all at once.

System Preferences- personalizing our settings. Cultivating our spacial proclivities. Harvesting. Like when you have to get a new phone, or splurge on a new tablet, it takes pruning until the thing feels right in the hand. Until everything is set up, there is an awkward tension.

Things unshown below (because sometimes the idea and the work do not match, they circle, and it’s important to tease out all the good bits I don’t want to miss out on before they scatter). I bought this dining set (for 4) on the day OSU announced our new normal, even though I live alone and live very modestly. I couldn’t look at the table I’d built and chairs I dumpstered anymore, let alone be locked in with them. They were each, those chairs and that table, in my life during a system preference that no longer exists. It was time for an update.

These paper modules choose their entity based on color, and though they have skittered and gathered,  forming rings around the chair legs, only one paper module has made contact. This isn’t doing it justice, but I was thinking about the levels of intimacy two entities (ants, objects, humans, armies, galaxies) can have without touching. Like that moment before a sneeze; so much tension.

I’ve been thinking about pathways – to and from safety, to and from invasion. My mind has been bungee-corded to considering the world at large and at miniature as I notice many times a day what I touch that could have been touched by another, or what I could touch that could be touched in the future. Who can affect me, who I can affect, and how that can ripple so much further than my eyeline.

‘Pathway’ implies flow, direction – left to right, right to left – but I think of them, often, as more universal (all the way right, then all the way left, or two parties converging in the middle), which distorts and deepens their meaning much like playing a record backwards does.

Below is a temporary installation set in my apartment, comprised of folded paper and mounted with tape.

“Not Twins, But Sisters”

I finished this diptych a month ago, which feels like 6 months ago.

Porcelain, stain, and copper.

I’m still reaching for how multiplicity can create both a crowd and an entity within our perception. I’m also continuing my interest in polarity, and charting the spectrum between two poles, with the work I’m currently creating in paper.

I wrote a few poems about this work (a habit I’m pursuing more often lately), which will follow the work in this post.

Details

I get caught in the details.

In the quick flick of a crooked smile.

In the smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.

In the eyes that darken over the course of a tense moment.

In a gaze held too long.

Both mine and theirs.

I am caught.

Within the shift from warmth to curdled.

Middle (exerpt)

I remember two sets of knees, kid fuzzy

Jammed against each other, jostling

And how the jug of water between my feet,

Was somehow warmer than my skin.

I remember my sister’s giggle as she snuck snacks

Ger fresh oversized front teeth gripping her bottom lip

Trying to muffle her own glee

As my dad drove my mom’s dad’s pickup, shifting jerkily.

My sister and me, in flip down side seats,

Knees to knees

Swaying sideways, in harmony

Our movements tethered to my dad’s feet.

(these images yearn for a computer equipped with photoshop and some RAM)

Before beginning a project, I like to practice mise en place, or “putting in place”. I have some idea of modular building / installation work I’d like to tinker with, but first it’s important to build the blocks. These “blocks”, or modular origami, are currently being stored in spear-formation, but I do not plan to build with them in this kind of formation. This storage method just enhances the memory of the folds I make.

It’s a good thing I’ve hoarded this paper for 10+ years.

With Hopkins locked up, I am experiencing a level of focused learning and experimentation that I have fiercely missed. Before returning to school, I spent 7 years working almost entirely from home, mostly on intricately formed or cut paper. I am a socially confident introvert, which makes a shared studio environment incredibly draining (though being a part of a strong community is something I am very thankful for, and I miss clay and kilns and space to be messy within).

I prefer to be alone. I prefer to let my mind wander to possibilities of a material that is rigid and fragile and formable and common. I prefer to sit for 10 hours and make small marks and small creases and small gestures that amount to something bigger when combined, and dizzying when delved into. This is not meditation. This is not calming. This is the way my brain feels the most engaged and the most lit up.

As I self-isolate and simplify my routine, I am astonished at what I can create. And as I work, my mind is not empty, it is working overtime. I am making connections. Connections between the many ways of working, material choices, captured gestures, modular-building, tropical and dangerous, art I have been trying to make sense of. As my hands create folded puzzles, my mind is catching up and solving the instinct- based puzzles I have made in my time at OSU.

There is fear, in this time, there is overwhelming sorrow and worry, as well, but I am choosing to focus on the puzzles I can control. I am focusing on how my mind works when it is fully charged. I am focusing on how good it feels to make, and to shift ideas into a old but new, medium. Paper and porcelain, they really aren’t that different.