Fragments began in early spring as a wall—a project of stacking cradled boards against the largest wall in my studio. I had been joining boards to create paintings since 2021—a pandemic project. This piece was to be the biggest and most ambitious of the joined paintings.
I initially used what came to hand—old paintings, experiments gone south, collages—and then adding overlays of paint, pigments and drawings creating history—a past to be covered over or excavated, re-invented.
The wall I was building was meant to be solid. Working upward from the large base panels, long boards interspersed with smaller pieces found their places—and then lost them. I tried new additons, fresh surfaces. What was this wall about?
Walls are meant to contain—to maintain a certain order—they create, at least briefly, a sense of a safety. A wall of paintings felt safe. I was also playing with the popular idea that paintings stop time, crystalizing a moment without a past or a future. I felt that this solid thing would not only provide safety, but somehow create a stopping place in the rush of events. At this point I was deeply into magical thinking.
By late spring the wall was standing—fragilely stacked with parts not yet attached. Around that time my family suffered the loss of one very close to us. Life seemed to stop, suspended.
All through the summer the wall stayed put. When it was finally joined together into three large parts to facilitate moving, I discovered that something had happened. The wood had shifted and some pieces had shrunk unevenly. Spaces between the panels were revealed—cracks in the wall.
It is said that space, more than any other element, is the defining quality of contemporary art. Artists are challenged with how we approach space, what we do with it and above all, how our work inhabits space. It is the great unknown that lends power and mystery to what we do.
I have always loved silence. I grew up with it—an only child brought up by a poet grandmother who was severely hard of hearing. She often spoke in literary quotations—poetry, Shakespeare, the Bible—these bright, beautiful bits dropped like images into the ground of silence.
My life with my grandmother was the beginning of my life as an artist.
The artists who inspire me—John Cage, John Luther Adams, Pina Bausch, Etel Adnan, are all acutely aware of the role of silent spaces.
So, space then. The painting elements that made up the wall seemed determined to separate into distinct forms—how would they co-exist on a wall? The answer lay in the distant past, in images of excavated walls—in which wall spaces and uncovered paintings form a whole.
I was learning something that perhaps I’d always known and had finally uncovered. The spaces in-between could and sometimes must be integral to the objects that inhabit them.
When things fall apart, space opens up.
