I started well. I acquired a large set of National Geographic magazines around the time of the fall of the former Soviet Union (1980s-1990s). When browsing the magazine, you can see what people were visually consuming – news events and issues around the globe, environmental concerns, and scientific discoveries. The images were quite interesting to me. Having watched collage artists make work that felt like Hannah Hoch, I thought I’d cut out pieces and see where it takes me. After a few days, I quickly realized that cutting out images or pages at a time and then having to organize them into files wasn’t working.

Thanks to an art friend who gave me her professional paper cutter, I started cutting 2″x2″ squares, like quilting. I had been thinking about quilting again, but I didn’t have time this summer. Cutting squares and choosing what to keep in/out of the frame seemed much more in line with my mode of working.

I didn’t know how to display the images once cut, so I kept them in a bag. Then one day, a neighbor was giving away some slide frames, which I picked up. The whole box had about 1500+ slide frames! They perfectly fit the images I had cut out, but I struggled with connecting the frames for several days.

I glued them into boxes, but then thought about where to store them after the residency, which is another issue. I thought about making them modular, so I can stack them back in the box once I made the structure.