The making of WONKY GEOMETRY

why did i make these? what are they about?

shiny shiny. i’m a magpie for color and shine. reduce reuse recycle. packaging has the best colors! one of my prime directives: never throw anything out. you can always find a use for it.

tiny little locus of control. very little decision-making. almost a game of chance. wanted to make something tactile after a long time in the digital realm. wanted to make something unreproducible. unphotographable. must be experienced in person tho of course now i’m struggling to photograph them to show you! looking at abstract artists whose work i admire for its color, texture, shine. in person, different surfaces: textured, matte, luster, gloss, reflective. try to separate from its original use. one rule: no words. tho perhaps i should title them with the brands included: kodak, cheerios, realty brochure. perhaps i should set up a rule that it must include just materials culled from one week of mail. am i allowed to use stuff i did not receive in the mail? i am NOT allowed to go buy any art materials. LOW art. low materials. some of these are bits of paper i’ve had kicking around for years. kodak!

Start here. This is where it began.

WOVEN

strips of color also combined with strips of old paintings. color interactions carefully orchestrated. i hate to talk about my psychological state, but i was depressed and at a loss. these felt small and safe and unserious. playful. should the weavings be cut into a shape? should they have long stringy edges formed by chance? compression and density in the center.

FACETS

these are quite different. the flat found papers are now assembled into an illusionistic 3d structure. creating space. denying space. create space deny space fussy time is here. i see rock walls and little rooms that push in and pointy protrusions. surfaces you could move across. lumps that tuck in at the edges. you could grab them. or could you? distortions abound. just when you read a convexity it’ll flip-flop on ya. digital play and inversion of colors. hand-coloring on top of the digital prints to make space lumps! Deborah Coombs wanted to know the rule I used to make decisions. no rules, Deborah. no rules! well, rules about not pasting anything over anything else. that’s a rule.