Patent Leather Sun. Artist’s book, digitally printed on 80lb coated paper, 40 pages, 8.5 x 11 inches, 2024

Sunbathing, Sunloathing. Artist’s book, digitally printed on 80lb coated paper, 32 pages, 8.5 x 11 inches, 2025

In these companion works, I consider reproduction (both in the sense of making a copy and giving birth), the self, and its dual capacity for external duplication and inner divisibility.

In Patent Leather Sun, I use colored paper and text to create a series of images, which are then printed out and incorporated into new compositions. As this process continues, a murky sense of scale and spatial sequence develops, as does an unsteady figure-ground relationship. Sometimes words are cut off, backward, or otherwise illegible. The text in this book alludes to pregnancy, the mother/child relationship, and performance of self. As words are reproduced in different contexts, their meanings are modified based on nearby words, colors, and relative size changes.

 As the text changes through the process of reproduction, so does the visual environment. Sunbathing, Sunloathing originates from documentation of Patent Leather Sun, where a set of female hands (belonging to the artist/author) turns through the book. With each page, the original source material becomes increasingly removed, disappearing into an expanse of fragmented hands, and eventually subsumed by blinding light. Cumulatively, these works suggest a maternal presence and a fragmented self—a self that cannot come together neatly, and which only becomes more fragmented in the endless interiority of pictorial space.