I started making small, 7.5 by 11-inch “magazine” collages as a way to access subconscious motivations and my own point of view. I often traced silhouettes of women from historical fashion books and runway models from contemporary magazines, and combined these graphite tracings with colored pencil, watercolor, and magazine cutouts. Sometimes I would flip the cutouts and they would function as readymades. I dated the pieces and made notes on the back, sometimes giving them titles, and kept them in a box in my studio. I made nearly fifty.
I was exploring how gesture and costume can be evocative of time and place and how different combinations can create tension and multiple meanings. The collage work also helped me to become conscious of the presence and importance of duality in my work (e.g., artifice/reality, public/private, self-image/identity, art history/popular culture, glamour/decay).
I started to re-contextualize the imagery. In one piece I overlaid an image of a photograph of a fall of hair on a woman so that it described the shape of the woman’s bare legs. In some pieces, the process resulted in multiple and/or open-ended meanings (e.g., clothing and peeling wallpaper; suggestions of body hair).