Balancing Meaning Series

With the Balancing Meaning painting and collage series, I use paintings that I find on the streets in Barcelona and surrounding towns, recycling centers or the throw out piles in the art studios of friends.  This series began from a supposed theatre prop I found in the streets of Barcelona in 2011. I removed the stuffed cloth that was nailed down on board and found a beautiful oval shape (floating in the middle of the square board) form marked by tapestry nail holes. I was pregnant at the time and painted the ovular shape while reflecting on the concepts of vessels and distance. In that moment, I was especially aware of living far from my family. From there I began repeating that ovular shape onto other found paintings as a process of contemplating beginning my own family in a different country from the one in which I was born. That process eventually lead to cutting up found paintings and creating this Balancing Meaning series of “stacked stones”.

Balancing Meaning evolved into a series of painting collages that reimagine traditional cairn piles of stacked stone markers found on paths and wilderness trails as symbols of human movement, adaptation, and memory. These stones are created from discarded or unfinished paintings with the intention to create forms that provide a redefined balance of intention.
The cairn, historically used to mark paths, graves, or boundaries becomes a metaphor for navigation, representing cultural assemblage and adaptation. The focus on balance represents the continual transition between origins and destinations. The use of discarded materials speaks to resilience, reinvention and the capacity to transform what is discarded into something guiding. Representing cairn stones with paintings merges the act of creation with the act of journeying, implying that our identities are always transforming depending on our environment.