One issue. One moment. One newspaper.
Every day brings wonder and worry as I navigate life as an artist, mother, and citizen. While personal victories and defeats unfold in quiet succession, they’re accompanied by the relentless chatter of alarm and opinion, a soundtrack we cannot silence or escape. We live our lives amongst all the shouting. I turn to collage as both meditation and anchor, weaving together intimate experience with civic awareness.
My process becomes an obsessive dialogue with a single newspaper, transforming the overwhelming flow of daily reporting into moments of unexpected revelation. Armed with one pressing issue, I parse each page for deeper resonance, allowing coincidence to guide discovery as headlines reconfigure into surprising new relevance.
The newspaper dictates my visual elements—grayscale photographs, typographic styles in their original sizes, and headline fragments that form unexpected word and letter jumbles when freed from their intended context. Found language poetry emerges, only to be dismantled and repurposed in service to the larger composition. Hidden within these cuttings you might discover personal details: song lyrics from albums on endless repeat and timely private moments, entangled with uncomfortable truths and opposing political viewpoints.
Like the news cycle that creates it, my work tends to overwhelm. You might resist engaging with it entirely—much as we resist the morning headlines. But if you’re willing to look closely, I’m curious: what words might find you?
What pulls your focus in an attention economy where opinion is as disposable as newsprint?
“You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will … and their motives may not be the highest.”
The Art of Living ~ Epictetus