Authoritative Forms

Abstract

In my art practice, I study the material world and how something forms, catches meaning, gets named, and becomes embodied. I am interested in how abstract things like feelings, love, and perceptions of lived experience take form, and how concrete things form, as in how an object becomes identifiable and understood. For example, why is an object, say a chair, its particular shape? What set of assumptions, beliefs, and materials underlies the formation of said object? I often explore these questions through language and materials. I play with instances where the material/formal (the visual and sonic) and semantic properties of language converge and blur, and potentially both describe and create alternative modes of seeing and knowing.Authoritative Forms is a participatory poem-object that invites playing and reordering of how formal entities-for my purposes, what is bound into something named and known-shape and construct our belief systems and assert authority on our ways of being. The work comprises a sheaf of handmade watermarked abaca and cotton paper arranged on a handmade wood table surrounded by work stools (figs. 1-2). Viewers are invited to take a seat at the table to handle, look at, read, and rearrange the papers.This work began with ruminations on how authority and information are expressed, concretized, and embodied through and with materials. These ruminations led me to the power of the document, the authority of the written word, and the materials used to assert this authority. One such material is paper.