“Text, textile, and texture share the Latin root ‘texere: to weave.’ Stories are woven, as are rugs. Both share the sense of multiple threads/influences coming together to make something greater than the sums of their parts." -Dr. Judith Hamera
My work focuses on weaving personal narratives together across different mediums. Though made in different ways, each piece is interconnected in both execution and content, and is a snippet of a larger on going narrative. Individually the works are fragmented and unintelligible, and viewers become participants creating stories by reconstructing the tangled information. When a viewer interacts with the work they make associations both extrinsically and intrinsically. These associations become the glue that binds the seemingly random bits of narrative together.
This method of creating a story through association reflects the system of hypertext which can endlessly link different documents together. When navigating hypertext one moves from page to page further away from the original text being read. From this process the role of the reader combines with the role of the author. Each reader’s navigation through the hyper-linked text creates a new and unique order of information.
Similar to the way that a Rorschach blot reveals the internal ego, my drawings, paintings, and prints provide an opportunity for the viewer to become an author. The abstractions invite the viewer to project their own ideas and interpretations onto the page. In addition, the titles are another fragment of the ongoing narrative. They act as a postscript and do not necessarily describe the content of the image, but rather serve as a signal to the viewer that their interpretation is valuable and important to the reconstruction of an overall story.
The videos are fragmented chapters in the ongoing narrative as well. Interlinked through text and imagery, they add more layers of information in which to reconstruct a story. The screen has several different functions. It sometimes includes footage repeated and layered on itself to act as a page on which text is read, it is sometimes like a non-sequential “home-movie” that suggests a dissociative state, or with imagery absent all together, it allows the viewer to visualize and project imagery onto the screen while following the text.
Through the layering and combination of different strands of text and imagery a texture is created which mimics the mind’s associative capabilities. This texture is suggested within my work, but the viewer ultimately creates the narrative. Each time I present my work, a different story is created. As I add new pieces to this body of work I create an ever-changing narrative.