Peaces of Us
The news is filled with distressing stories of genocide, war, and climate disasters, leaving many feeling hopeless. Living in a world of privilege, I struggle with feelings of uselessness and the urge to take action.
To calm my mind and keep busy in the evenings, I search for something peaceful to do while watching Netflix. In my studio, I find shelves filled with old shoe boxes containing scraps of paper from paintings I created over the past 35 years – some begun with others. These colourful and unique pieces are too precious to discard.
As I settle into my armchair with Netflix on, I decide to give these forgotten paper bits a new purpose. Surrounded by the collection of treasures, wire, pins and needles, I begin to thread them together into a cohesive whole. The creative process becomes a quiet and meditative kind of protest. Each paper fragment symbolises a person lost to climate change or conflict, each long strand, whole communities that have suffered. I call this series of 13 strands (and counting) ‘Peaces of Us’, a tribute to those who have been lost.
Each old shoe box holds thousands of off-cuts, shreds, and torn pieces of paper ‘leftovers’ from paintings made over the years. Too precious to throw away, these paper jewels shout out in their range of colour, texture, shape, size, edge – no one the same as any other.
