Altars
The Altars series began in bed. This past year, three back surgeries interrupted my practice and my life. Each time I would begin to heal, to find my way back to the studio, the pain would return, and I would start the process again. In the spaces between I would read poetry, write in my journal, make small sketches when I came up for air. The work grew with me as my body allowed it, small and slow and uncertain. The series takes its name from a line by the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama: "So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars." I was not quoting that line. I was living it. The question I kept returning to, in the studio and out of it: what can be made from the things I would rather not carry?
The surgeries did not just interrupt my practice. They changed it. I can no longer work on the floor, which is where I built everything for years, on my knees, pulling, tearing, rearranging. That space is no longer available to my body. The fragments are still there, spread across the floor, bins of torn monotypes, failed drawings, pieces of earlier collages carrying their histories forward. But I have had to reinvent how I reach them, how I build, how I physically make the work. That reinvention has become part of the series itself. Each piece references a stacked spine, an abstracted figure, or the complete coming apart of it all. The materials know what it is to be broken down and rebuilt. So do I. The process is slow, physical, and accumulative, each round of tearing and gluing a meditative act of searching for something worthy of the offering.
The surgeries did not just interrupt my practice. They changed it. I can no longer work on the floor, which is where I built everything for years, on my knees, pulling, tearing, rearranging. That space is no longer available to my body. The fragments are still there, spread across the floor, bins of torn monotypes, failed drawings, pieces of earlier collages carrying their histories forward. But I have had to reinvent how I reach them, how I build, how I physically make the work. That reinvention has become part of the series itself. Each piece references a stacked spine, an abstracted figure, or the complete coming apart of it all. The materials know what it is to be broken down and rebuilt. So do I. The process is slow, physical, and accumulative, each round of tearing and gluing a meditative act of searching for something worthy of the offering.
