“It's like a children's book for adults!” - Collector
137 Words About Trash is a handmade altered book. Finished in 2024 it is made of a book found in the trash, acrylic paint, wax pastel, colored pencil, markers, and vinyl. It is part of an ongoing series of found object altered books called Landfill Library.
Augmented Ink is series of hybrid drawings: part ink on paper, part photograph, part digital color finger painted on a phone. The project started as a way to further explore drawing while chronically ill, with the images and techniques developed at home, in bed or on the couch, using tools that fit easily into that environment. Using A5 paper, ball point pens, books as drawing surfaces, and phone for photographs and coloring all combined to create ease of access. This expanded to include cutting out the inks on paper and staging them around the house.
But what happens when an established process meets new place?
25 images into the series M took the process on a visit to their Mothers home: an RV summering in Wyoming. M’s Mother is also disabled and has crafted her own living space to meet those limitations. In this new space M experimented with how a process designed for one kind of disabled life might need to shift and change when exposed to a very different disabled lived experience.
The inks shifted from fine liners to thicker markers to enabled the quick hand needed in a space that was constantly moving. Singular drawings creating singular photographs was replaced with a collage of smaller drawing pieces not simply held up to photograph but instead installed mixed into the complex indoor and outdoor spaces. And with limited access to electricity to recharge their phone the artist stopped making each image beginning to end before starting a new one and instead focused their limited battery on photographing, leaving the final color stage for when they returned home.
These ink on paper drawings with digital color are maps of the ways that pain effects attention both in the physical and digital worlds. Each drawing, made in bed, was an early experiment in combining digital and physical making.
