remnants and residue has grown from a body of work that began five plus years ago when I started collecting unsolicited mail from a single source.

Within my practice of art making my work is based on a foundation of collection, deconstruction, and re-organization of subject matter often considered to be pedestrian. Candid photography plays a large part as a modification method that I use to catch less notable characteristics from the original material. Together these procedures lead me through incremental repetitions of imagery, an altered mass of visual information. They are best described as aggregates of color, texture, pattern and surface topography, anthologies or idiosyncratic portraits that document another view of the subject.

Specifically, over the past five years I have collected, deconstructed and examined many times over the remains of my parent’s junk mail. I have been stockpiling, shredding, photographing, printing and cutting unsolicited paper mail addressed to my father since 2012. After his death I chose to continue gathering the same from my mother. As unwitting collaborators each parent became a primary supplier of volume material, representatives of a demographic, and like errant threads they leave a trace undercurrent in the pattern of this ongoing work. Deconstructed, I am working with re-contextualized information, a curiously enigmatic endowment of broken down material and as a result over time find myself in a peculiarly interesting place---between an appreciably maligned media and the transformation of material identity. At this point in time it is the transition, the transformation of material identity that I find worthy of continued examination and the inspiration for *remnants and residue*.

This body of work represents a further shift from textual excerpts of original readable content to an emphasis on color, pattern, surface and exploratory construction methods. Bending the definition of the word recycled, *remnants and residue* re-uses and reshapes visual content. The result is an array of material iterations joined together by sequentially broken down material making use of the core processes of my practice.

Over the past decade and a half I have become increasingly aware of characteristics in my work that seem to parallel an important part of my personal history. In particular, I find that my use of repetitive reductively modified materials bear a relationship to a long line of familial fabric handlers and stitchers. As my own interest in methods of organization, breakdown and reconstruction increases I am also especially interested in reaching back for a look at techniques utilized by my grandmothers, their mothers and their communities when making rugs, quilts, blankets and clothing assembled from used garments and discarded fabrics. As a child I often helped tear, cut and organize old fabric into strips and squares for my grandmothers and aunts. Borrowing from those experiences, acknowledging the importance of the past and aware that this body of work is in a plausible stage of transition *remnants and residue* is an alternative interpretation of common pedestrian methods of making and my own reverential, indebted nod to the skillful innovative women who preceded me.

Copyright © 2024 Haw Contemporary | 1600 LIBERTY STREET | KANSAS CITY, MO 64102 | 816.842.5877