Writing

I've been really fascinated with the handheld which feels like an extension of my continued investment in touch as a sensorial evocation in my work. These small pieces, the size of a postcard or a book, fit within the palm of your hand and can be carried with you, can be smuggled inside a pocket, migrating. This idea behind a handheld object is not new, it has been around for centuries, and I love that it has almost this utilitarian history attached to it. Religious tablets or reliquaries meant to travel with the pilgrim. Schwitters carried his pocket-sized collages as he escaped the Nazis. The way a book can hold so much and still fit within our bodies in motion. 

These pieces were made this winter and are both their own compositions and studies that will inform bigger work and that also feel like echoes of past work and in the spirit of a study, are trying to understand something in order to get to something else. These have felt like handheld tablets whose system is to try to categorize, isolate, and play with process. Not just the process of making but what it means for a body to process, to start with a thought and end with a scream. The intimacy, the introspection I have felt these past few months, trying to take in a chaotic world and going through personal questioning and trials, made me look at the smaller parts, the ways a snowy morning feels like another planet because the sun hits a tree a certain way. A fisher cat emerging quietly out of the forest to check out our compost bin. The silence of that the snow brings with a faint bird song. What do we hold onto when everything feels too big, too engulfing? 

The material exploration and ways of putting image, object, drawing, form, together is a system of poetics. How does the volcanic rock speak to the phrase “skewed, feeling, breath.” An image of holes repeating themselves throughout ruins, body, nature, object. The way a painting becomes an object becomes a reliquary. Catching an action via an opening and closing of a trumpet that feels like an organ. These pieces are like writing samples trying to play with grammar, see where I can break apart a phrase and jam as many commas as possible.

Text by Estefania Puerta Grisales

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