Remnants, the Decay of Time
Remnants III—Woven By Light, 2025, Mixed media on paper, 11×14 inches.
Remnants began as an art study incorporating woven elements and gestures on paper with acrylic paint. But my fascination with decaying fragments of textile began years earlier during countless insisted upon trips to museums when I was a little girl.
Life has a way of mirroring fascination with experience. The pathway, however, of reflective understanding is often a portal through pain, especially if one’s curiosity delves into natural processes of decay over time.
The last few years, personal experience with grief from loss deepened my understanding of and curiosity about human entropy and states of disintegration. Cycles of birth and death, morning and night, absorption and elimination, and just the simple process of aging and digression in complex organisms have captivated my soul in new and deeper ways.
Museum work has also contributed to the enrichment and sophistication of my awareness of these cycles. Time in collection spaces conserving and preserving material and biological remains in a variety of stages of deterioration, has provided a unique perspective on remnants of the past.
As I handle, photograph, and prepare artifacts for storage, I am moved deeply by even the most ordinary fragments of bygone eras; a flaky and brittle satin bodice that seems three sizes smaller than expected for a mature woman; a dry and fragile leather fly net took hours to unwind and carefully coil so the strands could be easily spread but made small enough to fit in acid free packaging for storage.
Hours and hours handling objects of human remnants, of lives lived that now ride the laughing wind of memory.
I have a distinct memory on an ancient rock wall in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. It was a quiet day, not a lot of tourists. There was a slight breeze blowing. Sitting in a courtyard, a large kiva in view, the copper-colored cliffs towering over the massive walls of this now empty and deserted curated city built centuries ago, I couldn’t help hearing the voices riding on the wind; memories trapped in stone and earth unaware of me, but there just the same.
The evidence of change, of decay, is hard to miss yet was, at one time, easy to overlook and ignore. Age and loss have a way of reconciling inevitability.
All of this, and much more, is now concentrating itself in the construction of this particular series. Scribbles become the abstraction of frayed and undone threads. Loose, gestural marks the fragments of retrograde.
It feels good to paint with abandon, to give way to the messiness of something coming undone and not be precious with paint or movement. The soft oil pastels pushing into the surface of the paper in crude strokes feels symbolically freeing, letting go of the worry, the need to please, the perfection that doesn’t exist in disintegration.
The colors too are reminiscent of the imperfection of a shard receding into the gritty earth. What is preserved are remnants of former beauty, tattered, torn, yet magical. The story they tell isn’t one of immortality, yet it is still enduring and timeless.
If these remnants could speak, what would they say?
My hope is that those who spend time with these pieces can answer that question for themselves, and that by so doing, they will find peace in their work to leave a legacy of memory as potent and encompassing as those who are now reaching out to touch us from the dust.
