In a effort to preserve the many documents that I collected over the years I recently took them out of plastic tubs and cardboard boxes and placed them in heavy vinyl plastic bags. These bags were left over from the family business and I was fortunate to have so many of them to use. It reminds me to the early bags which I was given by my mother which became a staple of my studio work. The first formal piece in which I used small plastic bags was "Collect All Six". Now that I think about it.. the "FOURPACK" created for the First Show of 1984 was packaged in a small plastic bag. There is a strong theme of the use of plastic bags in my work since the middle of the 1980's.

The binders seen in the bottom half of this photo were an extension of earlier versions of document books which were solely my art work. these binders contained plastic sleeves and were used to organize assorted fragments of the work. I built these books at the time to use as documentation for the various projects I was working on and so at the end of a period of time... I had a volume which documented things in a fairly detailed way.

The binders shown here are photos albums. I found myself exploring the commercially available photo albums as a way to explore personal time and photos. the sticky nature of these volumes allowed me to begin to explore cutting and rearranging photographs. In the early 1990's after the birth of my third child... I began a body of work which I referred to then and continue to refer to now as "Dismembered Family".

Although I have not looked at these exact albums... I am going to guess they are part of that work. I found it necessary to photograph my reality extensively and to review the photos and then to begin to cut them apart. The ability to stop and examine time was a critically important practice for me as I became more and more deliberate in developing myself as a caretaker, provider and lover of my children. I found that I needed to think about them and to spend time with them and this endless time left me in a state of sensory overwhelm. the photographs helped me to slow things down and gave me time to visually examine reality.

This project started while still living in New Haven Ct. It developed fully during teh first year living at the farmhouse in Highland, Wis. My memories are of the walls of my bedroom being covered with photos of the children, Mike and the new and exotic farm landscapes. I used artists tape to adhere these photos to the walls and a simple sissors to start cutting them up.

The cutting was a random process. It was hard to cut the photos, especially the ones I really liked. I started to cut the ones that I considered to be weak in some way. I would turn them over and sometimes fold them in half and then in quarters and cut them not looking at the front of the image. Then I would turn them over and start to rearrange them until something new happened. I liked that I was only using a siszors and tape and or a glue stick. I needed to keep it very simple and very tactile.

This was still the time of film for me and I would take the rolls of film to the grocery store and order doubles and the larger of the prints... the 5x7 inche prints. I think I experimented with the glossy and the matt finishes.

Before this work there are a number of photomontages of the family. these were very different in that they were large sheets of paper.. I am going to say 11 x 17 with many uncut photos all arranged and then photocopied. I would use these to send to people but still mostly they were my own way of marking time. they were my own way of understanding what was happening.

The mothering work was an enormous task for me. I had a hard time processing everything. I had a hard time putting it all together. this got worse with my marriage to Mike and our two children. the bar was set high and I was confused and struggling to make sense of my domestic life.

The challenge was so enormous that I just keep it going. I held on with a thread and keep fighting to recover some sense of my self. that is what ultimately led to the move to Wisconsin but I know that the seeds of this move were planted long before and it was in its own way a critically deep dream. I wanted to leave the east coast. I wanted to leave the elitistally saturated community. I need to leave and my personal situation was making it more and more necessary.

I am jumping ahead a bit.. but that is fine and even wonderful. the bottomline is that these books in their cheap commodity culture patterns hold for me the moments that when added up create visual information about how I worked to understand who i was and what was happening to me.