Elegy / Paper

ELEGY

Series of 30
4.25" x 5.5" | framed 6.25" x 7.5"
handmade paper (bed linens), handmade pigment (bone)
2020

Created in the quiet space left after a death, Elegy is a meditation on the dual nature of living and dying; a devotional practice to the simultaneous pain and joy of transformation.

Death appears black and white, so very certain. But it is full of contradiction; it is sorrowful and light, visceral and beautiful, extraordinary and mundane. Bones — powerful symbols of the physicality of life and death — embody these opposite states: when galvanized by fire, they have the strange and beautiful ability to produce both black and white pigment.

For this series, sun-bleached animal bones were cleaned and dried, while others were charred in the coals of an open fire, and ground by hand into pigment. Worn cotton bed linens (our place of birth, dreaming and dying) were shredded, reduced to pulp, and made into paper.

Every mark made has been shaped by the uncertainty of the making process, and the play between the elements. Through this series of intimate explorations, what had seemed to be starkly black and white became more complex, revealed not to be separate, but rather deeply, delicately connected.