Thursday, July 25, 2024 [7:08 PM]

This past week, I was sitting on a blanket at the park with my dog gazing at the sky and reflecting. I’ve thought about the new work I am creating a lot lately. I have felt incredibly nervous to share it — both here and with my close friends. I want to know why, I want to go deeper.

I think a lot of the reason I feel nervous to share my new work is because it feels new. In some ways, I have let go of compartments I’ve constructed for myself. I’m doing things I wouldn’t have dared doing just 4 months ago. It feels like I am abandoning a body of work I’ve developed over the last 5 years. And I don’t want to let people down. I don’t want people to say they miss the old work. Or worse, the old me.

But I can go deeper. There is more to this. Because in every way, my art hasn’t truly changed.

I feel nervous, and I also feel excited. A wave of creativity I haven’t felt in a long time. Energy. I am actualizing the way I think, the way I feel, the way I process creativity. For the first time, it feels like it all aligns. No pieces of the wheel feel missing.

I am still thinking about leaning into the process's uncertainty instead of the process's destination. I’m curious about exploring liminal spaces and documenting the everyday moments in which I encounter these thresholds. I have shifted my focus away from the end product, and have embraced doing the thing because the thing feels right. Because it intrigues me in some way. It tickles my curiosity.

As I look through the five new pieces I have created, I see what’s familiar. I see how my ideas are still present, the materials are just evolving. I’m leaning into myself. It looks different. But it’s still me.

Themes still overly present:

1. Sky — I use the sky a lot in my work. The sky is a motif that, to me, stands for expansiveness, shifting, familiarity, memory, depth, liminal. It’s relatable. We all have a sky. We all experience the sky. I like thinking about it as a character, and brining them into my work intentionally. Evoking these feelings. Using these words in my narratives.
2. Atmospheres — Atmospheres feel like a newer motif to me, yet, when I named it late last year, I suddenly noticed it’s always been apparent in my work. Stemming from what used to be a more literal interpretation, in my new work, I am pushing the feelings atmospheres evoke. I am playing with scaling Moiré print patterns, blurry photos, and colorful glitches.
3. Fragments — The rekindling with fragments takes me back to my undergrad days, and is by far one of my favorite motifs in my work. Collage captivated me in a way where I was utterly delighted that I could literally show disjointed landscapes. Now, I see this disjointed feeling telling a bigger narrative in eliciting one to feel something more liminal when viewing my work. A representation of a threshold.

Extending my hand to the top right of a colorful test print to label it.