or
Using pages from the only book I remember seeing my mother reading during my childhood—Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds—OR is a personal response to the gender expectations and undiagnosed mental health conditions that shaped my upbringing. By erasing text and building free-association images, invisible, unspoken stories are conjured through the original narrative. This series of mixed media collage erasures asks if we can we get closer to someone by imagining what they saw and thought when they read.
Each piece begins with a page from the same paperback edition of the novel. A range of techniques including image transfer and cyanotype, hand-stitching, and hot foil stamping enact a visual “or” of continual possibility. The pages are then adhered to 10 x 6.5 inch sheets of Arches Text Wove paper. Work was completed from 2021 - 2023.
The process of making this series inspired me to write an illustrate memoir essay, which won the 2023 Rigel Prize and was published in Sunspot Literary Journal.
