Paper Caves
Many years ago, I wanted to make work about art history. I thought naturally to start with prehistoric art; that’s the beginning. Though, I was so concerned about making work about people that lived before record. How was I to make something that reflected anything factual? The scholarship around prehistory agreed that we could only speculate on the meaning of this work made so long ago. I realized the central tool I had as an artist was my fantasies of the distant past –– what I imagined things were. So, I started to act out these fantasies in my studio. I just kept posing and drawing myself in different scenarios. Eventually, I cut approximately one-inch-tall paper figures representing a composite fictional society, enacting festivals, rituals, sexuality, games, work, and warfare. They were placed beneath the caves and mountains of the crumpled sheets from which they were cut. These installations were presented on gallery floors. The imagined paper-thin civilizations were scattered at random among these heaps of white office paper – left vulnerable to their viewers’ examination as their feet precariously advanced between the outcroppings.
