2019 was a pivotal year. The new year brought the sudden loss of my aged mother, followed by a week long residency with a master paper-maker. As a 2019 MCAD-Jerome Fellow, I was granted access to the paper studio at MCAD and worked towards a site specific installation for the culminating exhibition.

Home #46:Order/Chaos depicts the instability of my childhood home. As a child, transforming the volatile chaos of home into worlds I could control saved me and was my genesis as a maker. I would escape to the nearby beach on Lake Erie, where I’d construct protective fantasy worlds of sanctuary with the wondrous debris that washed upon the shore. A loss of agency taught me self-reliance but as a child, I wasn’t strong enough nor mature enough to protect myself. In 2019 I returned home to bury my mother’s ashes next to my father. Revisiting the same beach, I acquired the shale collected to ground Home #46:Order/Chaos.

The ephemeral yet surprisingly resilient quality of abaca paper and its unpredictability became a lesson in letting go, apparent in Restraint. In working with wet sheets of over-beaten abaca, I observed through stitching, stuffing and shaping, this fascinating medium does not conform in the drying process. After a lifetime of trying to control outcomes this resolve is a breakthrough.

Images: Rik Sferra