explorations of gestures and pulp paint is a series of pulp painted portraits. I was investigating the properties of a range of eight fibers, using one for each piece. Both the handmade paper base sheet and the pulp paint were made with the same fiber. I combine controllable and uncontrollable processes — pulp pouring, pulp painting, and different drying methods — to manipulate the sheets before and after they are dry. The exploration of materials is just as important to me as the content and image making.
I excluded gendered anatomy in an attempt to queer the body and exhume the gestures from the confines of a strictly identity-based analysis. When I decided in which perspective to capture each gesture, I considered the theoretical concept of the male gaze — not based on its relation to gender, but rather power, force, and authority.
I decided which gestures would be included in this series at the start of each new painting, depending on which was resonating with me or haunting me that week. I performed these gestures myself, taking note of where I was holding tension in my body, and in doing so trying to understand where someone else was holding this tension in theirs. It’s a kind of introspective interrogation of the gestures not just to try to understand the emotion behind it, but also to provoke that emotion within myself. I’m interested in non-verbal communication and the things that are left unsaid; unknowns and assumptions; what is conveyed by individual images and what narrative emerges through them in series. Viewers may perceive different emotions than each other and apply meaning based on their own experiences and intuition. When it comes to the meaning of a gesture without context, I appreciate that we both don’t know and can’t know its significance. These portraits are inconclusive; each is a fragment.