Paper Letters

In the series Paper Letters, I’m using stories made physical, in the form of deconstructed journals, hand lettered transcriptions of emails and instant messages, letters written but never sent, and texts written about my memories of past events. These texts are then deconstructed, disfigured, and distorted through repetitive processes: cutting, folding, stitching, pleating, stringing into chains. Through these painstaking techniques the text is distorted to the point of destroying the narrative power of the original text, and transformed into raw materials to create anew.

The physical material, paper, goes through a transformation of its own. Initially flat, smooth, rigid and fixed in dimension, it becomes irregular, flexible, three dimensional, and changeable. This static material (and static narrative) becomes supple and dynamic. It can change shape at the desire and will of the handler. I can rebuild into a shape, and that shape can continue to change.