Forwarding: Provisional Pairs
Forwarding: Provisional Pairs, 2021, carbon transfer on handmade Japanese mulberry paper, eighty-nine diptychs, dimensions variable (each sheet 12 in x 9 in)
I make most of my work by devising rules-based systems for interacting with specific source material, mostly originating in the domestic arena. The projects grouped under the common title Forwarding are a celebration of and “collaboration” with 19th century quilt-maker Rachel Blair Greene. Between 1885-95 she made a crazy quilt that includes 306 interlocking abstract shapes as well as extensive embroidery and hand painting and it’s now in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Like most quilt makers of the 19th century, Greene’s work would only have been known to her family and friends and it is unlikely she would have been formally recognized as an artist in her lifetime.
Each of the eighty-nine diptychs in Forwarding: Provisional Pairs includes three of Greene’s shapes. The first is common, chosen with a random number generator, and appears on both sheets. That common shape is paired in the left sheet with a shape chosen by me that must be contiguous. In the right sheet the common shape is paired with a contiguous shape, possibly the same one, that is chosen at random. After appearing in a diptych the shapes are eliminated from consideration and the process continues until all the shapes have been allocated.
My intention is that almost nothing in my piece duplicates the original. The drawings themselves are carbon copies, traced by hand on Japanese mulberry paper, and their effort is to replicate. This process follows several stages that began with a hand tracing of a digital scan of a printed photograph from a museum catalog.
By bringing Greene’s nineteenth century shapes forward to the present I am able to wrestle with my own questions about authorship, originality, gender, the hierarchy of craft and art and finally the significance of artistic intention—both past and present.
All Image Credits: Tom Powel Imaging
