Sometimes I go to the Goodwill a block a way and spend hours sorting through the items and amusing myself.

One game I play is finding two objects that belong together that have been scattered and place them back together (based in a childhood game I played called “Memoria” which is technically the Spanish version of “Concentration”). Another is the stacking game. It started when I would stack pieces of silver plate to create “Stupas”. Then it was stacking ceramic cups and bowls, exploration for a project called “Beauties of the Western Regions”, a play on the Ukiyo-e “Bijin-ga”. Long story.

At one point it became a game called “Jellyfish” where I would stack glassware to form organic shapes which I began to call Jellyfish. This came about in part because I was imagining objects that would play the roles of sea life in the backgrounds of my found object installations about the Fisherman and the Princess of Atlantis, a body of work called “Atlantis, Full of Cheer”.

With the Jellyfish becoming a stand-alone body of work, there’s a nod to oceans, and a nod to overproduction and waste, but there’s also just the visceral recombinant play that keeps showing up for me. At first I would leave these assemblages behind, but eventually I collected some of these forms, and photographed them at the Grocery, using my Calumet 8x10. My thought was to contact print them as Cyanotypes, but lately I have been exploring printing them as large silk banners so they can capture a bit of movement. Ongoing.