HUB

Dearest,

I do not think that I could be your teacher. Or, not in the sense that you feel you need teaching—in those fundamental techniques, those strict constructs surrounding how to make colors and lay down paint… those are things I always worked around and never with.

As for your perspective that I no longer paint or sculpt, well, I suppose I do not, not in the traditional sense.  However there are occasions when I’ll break out the water colors and guache and paint something insignificant.  As for sculpting, I was never much for carving stone—I enjoyed working with wood and metal, but didn’t really have the facilities for such things after undergrad, so fell out of practice.  When I think of sculpture, though, I think of any 3-dimensional output.  My BFA thesis work ended up in porcelain, such a supple and yet temperamental material, as fragile as it is pliable.  I also worked with paper as a sculptural material—a book is an object in 3 dimensions and can be considered a sculpture if you treat it thus.  I did work with porcelain again while in Chicago, two summers ago, when working on the princess idea.  But these objects took on a whole other life, revealing themselves as imagined artifacts, part of my collecting behavior and research that eventually took the form of a performance installation. 

Here’s where I think you are wrong about me no longer painting and sculpting, in the non-traditional sense, that is.  Painting was for me about gesture and color.  Sculpture about movement, push and pull with a material, responsiveness to space and time (time especially with paper and clay).  These are fundamental ideas in the work that I do now, in the materials that I use, some found objects, some crafted by myself or others.  The body is central as a sort of moving image or an object affecting space and time.  Visual and tactile components cannot be ignored and are instead embraced in how I approach COMPOSING a dance.  The major difference is time, I suppose, that what painting and sculpting make so permanent and thus seemingly significant, performance makes ephemeral and less monumental.  Oddly enough, while I want my work to feel monumental in a way, or at least to leave a lasting impact on my audience, I want it to happen through the accumulation of moments instead of one moment frozen in time.  The accumulation of moments becoming a sticky place itself, where one returns, where one questions, where one is jarred from his or her reveries into the present.  I was once told that I was choreographing over my canvases, but I think that I am still painting my choreography, sculpting my dancers into their environment, drawing a map between you and me and the world of the interior—a map that we can feel written on our bodies, that we can continue to traverse when lost or just looking for company.