Papercuts

For more than a decade the artwork that I made was primarily cut paper illustrations. My early papercuts were focused on pattern and abstraction. I was just getting to know the medium and was drawn to the meditative quality of the process.

Over the past six years I have made portraits of my friends, family members, and have done commission work of pets and people from all over. In 2016 I started a series that I called Guided By (Female) Voices, which I exhibited at Aviary Gallery in Jamaica Plain in February of 2018. In that time I made 53 portraits of women that I admire. I started with some of my art heroes: Yoko Ono, The Guerilla Girls, Margaret Kilgallen, Eva Hesse.

Having made the interesting decision to spend my entire adult life as a teacher entrenched in adolescence I think a lot about the folks who supported me into becoming an adult. As the series progressed I started to make portraits of my friends who are also artists, mentors, and folks that I admire and also know in real life.

I loved the binary nature of cutting a silhouette. You are either in or out. I would start with a full sheet of paper and just needed to extract pieces until only the final image remained. I liked seeing how far I could push to the line between falling apart and holding together.