New Work: serious play
My best teachers taught me that creativity flourishes within limitations. I think of these limits like a play structure: a contained formation in which to climb and explore, pushing at the edges until new responses and possibilities emerge. Sometimes I create structure through the parameters of a project and sometimes life does through the situation of a pandemic, racial justice movement, political crisis, or climate devastation.
Whatever the structure, I try to approach my work like play - with absorbed focus, curiosity, spontaneity, and dedication. I enjoy a playful process but I believe in a serious result: work that confronts inequality and pain while striving to connect and heal.
My design installed in the entryway of University Health Women’s & Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, TX.
Donor Wall for Hospital
After the successful completion of art for two floors of the University Health Women’s & Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, TX, I was commissioned to design the donor wall, a 63 foot expanse located at the entrance of the new hospital. Working closely with hospital’s design team and foundation, I created this painted gouache and collage design with space for donor names and stories. The design was scanned, enlarged, and digitally transferred to the walls with flat and low-relief elements.
3 Objects 100 Times: a tribute to my dad
My father, John Early, was an incredible artist and, along with my mom, my biggest mentor. On March 6th, 2023 he passed away and in the wake of this loss, I have been exploring ways to stay connected with him. He always talked about a college art assignment in which he picked 3 objects to draw 100 times. He called this assignment a "seminal event" in his art career. As the one year anniversary of his death approaches, I am trying out this project for myself. Each drawing is a tribute to the careful observation, the creativity, and the dedication of my dad.
One Form of Truth, 2021, 35” x 23”, charcoal on paper
RACC LEARN Grant: portrait and figure drawing
In Summer 2021, I was awarded a RACC LEARN Grant to support a learning intensive in representing the human form. With this grant, I have been able to take two drawing courses at The Drawing Studio, where I have learned new technical skills and gained renewed enthusiasm for how to explore my own response to the subject. I have also been able to meet regularly with Samantha Wall, a skilled portrait artist. Her mentorship has supported my drive to create professional work and expanded my understanding of what it means to be an artist and to portray the body.
Orfeo in Underland: puppet production
Renegade Opera hired me to create the Heavenly Being puppet for their Summer 2021 production of Orfeo in Underland. I created this character to embody the spirit of the “Elysian Fields” (underworld) in which the great drama of the opera takes place. Inspired by a wise and grieving mother moon figure, the Heavenly Being stood 12ft tall and stretched her arms to a span of 30ft! This was an exciting opportunity to work collaboratively with an amazing creative team of performers, a stage director, musical director, costume designer, and production team.
Working on one of the corridor designs - cutting collaged paper shapes with a razor
University Health Hospital: art commission
The Salud-Arte Program at the University Health Women’s & Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, TX, commissioned myself and artist, Laura Bender, to design four floors of the new hospital. The art - made from painted gouache and collage technique - will be scanned, enlarged, and digitally transferred to the walls when the hospital opens in 2023. I created full-wall designs for two separate 150ft corridors, 8 unique patient rooms, and one family waiting area. The designs are based on the theme of “in bloom” and intended to bring a sense of playfulness and calm to pediatric and neonatal intensive care units.
Emergency Floor waiting room, 2021, enlarged and installed to wrap around a 8’8” x 34’ space, collage and stencil design scanned and printed on wall covering
Viscerality: a body exploration
With the onset of the pandemic and quarantine I turned to my body, which suddenly seemed both so vulnerable and so solid - my companion and source of touch. I spent time feeling my skin, muscles, and bone structure and tuning into the deeper emotional sensations inside. For several years I have focused on conveying inner experiences through a visual language of color and form. Last spring I used this language to make drawings recording the experience of touching each part of my body. This project is an effort to reclaim my experience of my own body because I was taught that my body should, and could, only be known by other people.
The pandemic calls us to “stay home” and our first and most enduring home is our body. This is an opportunity to turn inwards, to embrace the visceral. “Visceral” means the gut, the innermost place in the body, the seat of deep and real expression. Visceral contrasts with virtual which is a simulation of reality and one that we are all too familiar with during quarantine. This body map is my attempt to welcome and embrace the visceral experience of living in my human body.
The body map
I made this map out of separate pieces because that is how I was trained, by Western philosophy, to experience my body and also because the limitation helped me to focus and deepen my observation. Sewing the pieces together was a healing ritual of integrating the many pleasures, traumas, and wisdoms of my body into a whole. I left space between some of the squares because the body is fluid, there is always space for new experience.
Where does this lead?
Multimedia Collaboration
This project has inspired conversation and creative exchanges with artists of other disciplines about the visceral experience of the body. Theater Artist/Vocalist, Joellen Sweeney, responded to my individual drawings with filmed dances. In collaboration with Musician, Maria Olaya, we are expanding this exchange to include music.
Workshops
Joellen, Maria, and I developed a method of using guided drawing and movement exercises, accompanied by live music, to facilitate visceral communication for participants through virtual video call workshops.
With Activist/Educator, Chelsea Viteri, we also led a bilingual land acknowledgement ritual connecting the body and the earth for the international 2020 Spiritual and Theological Mutual Accompaniment conference.
More layers of the map
I am eager to add layers to the initial map of my body. Each drawing I made was of the experience of touch in that moment. My body and my experience of it are always changing. I want to document these changes through additional maps that can be hung, spaced out one behind another. The viewer will be able to walk between the layers, glimpsing - through gaps in each map - new combinations of the whole.
A Constellation of Hands, 2020, razor-cut shadow puppet piece made for Handmade Stories Live.
Handmade Stories Live: a performance
Handmade Stories, a public art & storytelling project started in 2018, is evolving into a multi-media performance inspired by the stories I gathered in recorded interviews, drawings, and creative writing participation from the public. These stories about hands exposed a spectrum of tenderness and violence, skills and cultural expressions, societal boundaries, and a yearning to touch. The performance will include shadow puppetry accompanied by recorded audio from the original interviews, live music, and poems written and recited in response to these conversations.
The global Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement are changing our stories and our hands. The goal of this performance is to incorporate these new insights and stories. If you would like to share your new hand experiences please contact me. Learn more about storytelling and oral history projects here.