The Process

This is what my desk usually looks like when I'm working. It's usually quite overwhelming, especially once I'm done. I just sort of stare at it in disbelief. The crazy part is that most of these pieces of paper have a specific home, and then I spend more time putting them all away than I did working. I think this is a pattern that can be abstracted to other aspects of my life. A lot of my collages are very simple and seem very obvious or firm to me once I’m finished with them, but the process reminds me that it wasn’t very obvious at all. In fact, it was quite a big mess. And it’s everywhere.

I don't have a studio right now so the mess is contained to the desk, but in college I did have a studio. Calling it a studio is a chic way of putting it. In reality, the studio space was located in an "abandoned" office building that used to house the Yale Art Gallery administration. The building was due to be demolished and repaved into a parking lot shortly after my graduation. Pre-demolition, it was pitched that undergraduate art majors use it as studio space (even though it was poorly ventilated and poorly lit). I was lucky and won the lottery draw, and so I received a "studio" my junior year (a rarity) which I then inherited for my senior thesis work. 

The office building was brick and open floor plan, just generally super, super funky with its layout. There were no partitions or delineations where one office began and the other started, with some rooms meaning to contain whole teams of people and others only one individual. There was a walkway-bridge-type situation inside the building that would connect about 5 private offices (meaning the heads of heads would sit up there because the offices were not open and, in fact, had closing doors). My studio was one of these rooms: it was carpeted and completely empty and very warm. It had no furniture. It got very little light, and so I rarely worked there when the sun was up. I put a mattress in my studio. Next, I began to hoard a lot of trash, like actual trash: giant discarded pieces of plastic, industrial sized bolts and metal debris, the rubber of a tire left on the side of the road next to the Walgreens I frequented. It didn’t resemble a dumpster though, as I was very good at organizing my hoard into cute piles.

I don’t have much documentation of how I would work during this time, but to paint a picture: imagine the walls covered in giant plastic tarps, covered with wet paint and glue, the gray of the carpet was no longer visible and completely covered in tissue paper, string, cloth, wooden boards, beads, seashells, and gallon bags full of dryer lint I collected from the college laundry rooms. Surprisingly, all this didn’t smell too bad. I would work within a nest of everything I had accumulated, everything simultaneously hidden but within an arm’s reach. My senior year, it became clear that I had outgrown my “studio” and so I expanded into an office next door, mirroring mine. Now I could have twice the amount of stuff…and I did. I began to collect pounds of seashells and my own hair. I got rid of the mattress to dissuade me from sleeping there. Those years, there was rarely an evening when I did not work in my studio(s).

Because I had a set space, and because I did not need to live there, no object was too small or too big to bring off the street. Anything could have been interpreted as “material” and I had become less and less picky, much more inventive, and easily excited by the refuse of other people. In contrast, now that there is no studio, now that I work at my desk (which is in my home and which I have to look at everyday), I severely limit my source material. I largely use paper because I can get it from books and books can sit on a shelf and look organized. Cut paper, when piled flat, takes up no room at all. I can longer harbor the rubber of an abandoned tire. The urge to work digitally is so strong now. Also, I’m less afraid of my cat eating a scrap of paper than a small, sharp piece of metal I neglected on the floor.

I still make a mess but it’s all different now. I don’t make anything larger than myself anymore. Most of the time it’s no bigger than the palm of my hand. It has all been compressed! Perhaps one day I will be able to unzip the file that I used to call my process. But until then, I will take all of my paper out and put all my paper away, over and over again.