My collages are made by painting sheets of watercolor paper, determining a specific palette of stained and overlaid strokes of interference and iridescent color, until a particular tonality and mode of application is reached. I then cut the paper into angular and curvilinear shapes or letters, and affix them to my supports of 51 x 90” sheets of Arches paper that have a strong materiality and function quasi-sculpturally on the wall.
I began working from poems, combining fragments of sentences that point to my chosen subjects. Below is a large-scale collage work on Arches paper inspired by the images brought forth in the writings of Seamus Heaney and Pablo Neruda. The poems I excerpted are “Exposure” and “The Citizen”, respectively. Rather than using a modern font, such as Helvetica, I use a gothic style font located graphically between those used for the mastheads of The New York Times and The Times-Picayune (the New Orleans newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath). I wish to create a dissonance between fragments of language and the time period evoked by the font.
