carrier bag
Handmade paper, eel grass, abaca, mixed recycled fibers, cotton and synthetic hand-knotted nets, beads, found objects, cyanotype, silver gelatin print, stones, glass, brick, steel pins
2025
Named after Ursulua K. LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, this work brings collections of found objects and fragments together in ephemeral installations mounted as dimensional paper assemblages. Photos from my archive are remediated into new compositions, wrapped in netting, and cast upon objects; as an image is also an object, stories and memories must surely also be (of) their own materials. I wonder how our “entropic wastes” can tell LeGuin’s “life story” alongside the “death story” of extractive capitalism, climate disaster, and untenable consumption. As I hand-knot each net with wooden shuttles lovingly made by someone dear, I wonder about how these collections of castoffs tell the story between life and death , the story of grief and loss and transition, the story of sowing and gathering and feeding new life.
Field paper eel grass material research
Handmade paper, abaca, eel grass / plywod, bamboo, pellon, brick
2025
Field paper making set-up and eel grass material research process on Prudence Island during my time as an artist in residence at the Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. This research has culminated into a short field manual / publication called sea weaving.
sedimentary
Handmade paper, abaca, flax, cotton, recycled & found fibers, pulp paper blowouts, found objects, glass, paint, digital photography
2024, ongoing
sedimentary is an ongoing field research, paper-making, & photography project exploring the blurring of the natural and built environment and the entropic entanglement of natural and synthetic materials. The places I call home, the Appalachian Mountains and the Narragansett Bay, have distinct legacies of industrial innovation, proliferance and decay, and are covered with the remnants of these industries, creating what I consider modern transitional ecologies. In this series I’m producing
paper objects which incorporate / emulate found and foraged fibers, street trash such as glass, plastics, construction materials, and other natural elements like stone and soil. Originally taking inspiration from the thick chips of lead paint that are sedimented onto the old mill buildings and warehouses in this area of Providence, the paper objects in this series are dimensional but not cast or vacuum formed, emulating the weathered and battered forms of trash as it moves and is transformed over time.
To accompany this project I am doing material research into foraged fibers and synthetic found fibers for papermaking, focusing especially on cooking and processing foraged fibers that I’ve collected in the Narragansett Bay as an artist in residence on Prudence Island, as well as creating hand-woven nets to accompany sedimentary in its various installation forms.
sedimentary has been developed during the 2024 and 2025 Winter Residency at the Penland School of Craft, and has been installed at Penland, the Waterfire Arts Center, and in tangled stream, a group exhibition put on by myself and my studio mates.
tangled stream
Installation photos
June 2024
tangled stream was a co-curated pop-up exhibition and open studio by MJ Sanqui, Vic Xu, Felicita Devlin, Audrey Buhain, and Hayley Canal, installed in Hayley’s Vinton St. apartment
It has since evolved into a print, photo, and publishing collective; themes intertwining our work include emergent ecosystems that brace our crumbling world, histories hidden in material afterlives, re/mediated archives, diasporic identity, and memories that are fluid and collective.
entanglements / remnants
Handmade paper; abaca, flax, cotton, recycled & found fibers, risograph prints, gel medium transfers, digital photography
2023, ongoing
catharsis! Handmade paper, abaca, flax, cotton, recycled & found fibers, acrylic, oil pastel, colored pencil, graphite
2019 - 2021
catharsis ! is a body of drawings, paintings, and collages on/of handmade papers made during Fall Concentration at the Penland School of Crafts. It was exhibited as a solo show at the Looking Glass Gallery in Boone, NC in November 2021
My thoughts have always felt jumbled up, like they’re moving too quickly to express or understand, so I often think out loud. Drawing and painting feel like that: putting a mark on the page is the most direct line to making my feelings and ideas tangible. Working abstractly is a kind of automatism, a process through which I can follow my instincts and allow colors, forms, and marks to express what I can’t quite reach with words. Most of the pieces are untitled because they serve more as parts of a larger exploration of abstraction through color and form rather than acting as individual pieces. Like catharsis, this work is unexpected and unmeasured, arriving as a burst.