Public Story
Floating Petals - paper sculptures
Set of 18, 8”x10” each
(2020)
My childhood home and its’ garden on Bloomfield Street, which no longer exist physically, represent a sanctuary that I feel I have lost in adulthood. By excavating family photographs and other materials from my early life, I have found that underneath the layers lies a deep desire for the refuge and freedom of imagination that I had in childhood and thought I would always have.
In my series Floating Petals, I explore my unrequited longing for the refuge and freedom of imagination inherent in the place that I once called home. To make these paper sculptures, I mulched family photographs taken within my childhood garden and added dried flowers and plant matter from my parent’s present-day garden. Once shredded, the pieces were brought back together to take on new form. Blindly digging for photo fragments in the murky water felt analogous to the search for memories and the loss of detail as remembrance fades. After being pressed, I intuitively shaped and wrinkled the paper, resulting in sculptures of likeness to hilly landscapes or abandoned handkerchiefs. Together, with petals of new and old, I created my own gardens in which to explore.
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