The Maker

February 17, 2022

What are my 30 years of living memory built from?

The outdoors immediately come to mind. Bare feet. Cold grass. My parents’ house and my grandparents’ back porch. Baking mud pies. Enacting stories.

I think about repurposing items with the intention of transforming them. I wanted to invent things, but not NEW things, EXISTING things. Objects that I could make work a lot better than before. I was (am) bossy.

Envelopes… I was obsessed with making envelopes. Containers in general. Objects that contain messages, memories. Everything had a use. I was (am) a little bit of a hoarder that way– keep everything, surely an opportunity will come along to bring this thing into play.

I’m good at fixing, editing. I always liked to create, but really I wanted to make in order to then make into… Tracing or copying wasn’t enough. Wiedererfindung was key. To find again. Spirals.

(Re)Invention of artifacts, of characters. Walking on the monkey bars. Adventure, fantasy. Altering the intended use. Staying curious about what other purpose a form could offer.

The thing is… I never defined anything. Early on, I understood the reverberations of context embedded in meaning. The impermanence of boundaries.

Still, I wanted to make everything for myself. To draw on any surface. To twist my own braids, to paint my own nails, to dress myself. To make the image I saw for myself. My identity. Maybe that’s just perfectionism. But I like to think I’ve always had a sense of how I wanted something to be.