recent work

Holding Space

As with most of my endeavors anymore, the challenge I thought I was taking on with this series of potato prints was not even remotely the primary challenge I actually faced. 

The challenge I thought I was taking on was maintaining a calm, dogged effort at printing crisp diamond-, rhombus-, or triangle-space after crisp diamond-, rhombus-, or triangle-space until each of the dozens (or hundreds) of such shapes that I had penciled out were all filled in. I thought it was going to be a lot of Dory channeling – “just keep swimming, just keep swimming…”. And it was that.

But the bigger challenge was holding space for mistakes. 

I made them over and over, printing in spaces that were “supposed to be” voids and then having to punt/pivot/regroup and figure out how to redraw the lines to make something work. Over and over, starting with the first black and white piece (aka Untitled 1) and going all the way through to the final blue-hued piece (aka Holding Space) – I screwed up. Or, put more kindly, I deviated from the original plan. And I would be lying if I told you that I rolled with these mistakes, because I didn’t. Every time they landed emotionally in terribly outsized ways and every time I had to talk myself through and just keep printing. 

I don’t have a lot else to say about this body of work except that in the end, I’m proud of it. 

Now on the other side, I rather like the messy bits that show up in the “primary” prints (the ones with the more saturated blacks and blues). At least it’s clear that a very human human made the pieces. I also really like the unexpected gifts that show up in most all of the “secondary” prints (the ones that look rather ghostly and have what look like creases running through them). It’s almost as though the chance alignments that turned up in the secondary prints, which I couldn’t have executed if I’d tried, were signs that the Universe was smiling (or laughing out loud) at me and my worries over the unplanned deviations in the primary ones. 

Holding space, indeed.