The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida wrote about the power of the ‘presence of absence’. This concept of not knowing describes my non verbal, meditative creative process in which I create a quiet, private, intuitive language based imagery. The abstract fragmented collages are created with many repetitive cut paper strips of found printed material. The form is very linear and horizontal as in the form of writing. I gather, arrange, and reconfigure into another context the written word. I incorporate found printed papers, type, handwriting, shorthand, diagrams, ledgers and old discarded pages out of old books. In these subtle mixed media works the creative process is spontaneous, unspoken, and unconscious.
My influences are many and include architecture, technical drawings, language and alphabets.
The works, which are on panels and paper, consist of my painting on pages from old ledgers, lined notebooks and scraps of printed text. One of the sources is a 1940’s book on perspective and architectural drawings. I paint, cut, layer, arrange and paste the assorted parts and transform them into another context of a visual language.
These mixed media collages are about my creative process of developing an unknown language, of mark making, and writing. As we are in the digital age, this process of gathering of the old materials is about memory and our history.