In my time in graduate school, I’ve developed a practice heavily focused around refuse. There is physical refuse, like my partner’s old work clothes, too worn out to be of use, or the paperboard packaging from the meals I make, medical bills, letters, cigarette butts, food packaging—any material that can be tied to the body through labor, nourishment, or self-care. There is also psychological refuse: fragmented, distorted memories altered from truth through years of rumination, generationally inherited dysfunctional behaviors and thought patterns, obsessions, compulsions, delusions, and grief. I believe that what we choose to discard creates a detailed portrait of the self, a convoluted curation of what we believe no longer serves us.

My practice is entirely cyclical, involving the making of my own paper substrate from physical refuse. This is coupled with the repetition of printmaking, stamping a block or screen printing, in order to process the psychological refuse and to document thoughts about my estrangement from my father’s family. What are the challenges of becoming a fully-formed adult in a world both the same and different as the ones they occupied had and have occupied, especially with such limited information about their inner lives? My face matches my grandfather’s, my uncle’s. But my father’s face looks nothing like mine. How can we solve fictions we know nothing about?