frottage and sculptural drawings

In my newer frottage work, and what I call “drawing installations,” I’m further investigating physical presence through literal touch. Frottage is something we are taught to do first as children, and is often our earliest association with drawing. Each piece I make is created with 100% rubbing technique, either from an actual object that is laid under the paper, or a meticulously-cut out form that is revealed in the rubbing. The variety of mark-making, pressure, and control can all be clearly seen.The distance this creates between my hand and the finished work creates tension around the concept of control and chance.

The art of frottage itself is a historic technique. In America, the technique became popular as a way to create mementos out of gravestones of loved ones. The carved stone letters offered the perfect surface for a transfer, and these drawings were often framed as artwork that memorialized the dead. People would also create rubbings while traveling, capturing inscriptions of significant places.

One doesn’t have to visit a graveyard to find objects of significance. By playing with the familiar, I’m highlighting the strangeness that is always present, though often invisible, in our daily lives.

In her 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist is confined to a small room in her home, diagnosed with a “hysterical tendency,” which was likely postpartum depression. This confinement turns inward, and she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper pattern in her domestic cage. She sees a ghost woman creeping behind the wallpaper that is desperate to be released, and as the story ends, so does her grip on sanity.

The silence and oppression of women’s mental health in the face of a strong patriarchal and capitalist mindset is as much a contemporary issue as a historical one. My piece Backdrop for a Collision conjures up a decadent world of domesticity, but also begins to fall apart as the pattern turns upside down and collides with itself near the floor.