Handmade on Exhibit

The Coral Fan express our intertwining with nature in this portrait of a man with mythological tattoos.

My handmade artworks, about the metamorphosis that tattooing gives people, are exhibited with the work of two other artists at a boutique hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Untitled at 3 Freeman Alley, from November 2023 through February 15, 2024. The exhibit titled “Vital Impetus: Life Signs”, curated by Elizabeth Chatham of AzureArtsNYC is situated in the expansive modern lobby. The hotel aims to provide guests, the “tattoo generation”, with the flavor of New York City with our artworks, murals and even graffiti.

My handmade artistic approach fits with the murals hand painted in the hotel. My works on exhibit are about tattoos. I use film when I photograph people’s tattoos. I enlarge my 4X5 inch film in a wet darkroom and brush palladium on handmade Japanese gampi paper to print my negatives. I use the sun to develop the images.

The handmade Japanese gampi paper, situates the palladium images of tattoos like tattoo ink penetrates skin. Gampi paper is made from a bush found in the mountains and warm areas of Japan. Gampi cannot be cultivated and therefore is rare and the most expensive of the handmade Japanese papers. Its translucency and shiny texture make it ideal for my work incorporating tattoos with fragments of nature. It is the perfect ground for the metamorphosis I seek in my artwork where human tattoos meet fragments of nature. This metamorphosis, I hope, will transform the experience of people sitting in the comfortable lobby as they talk, enjoy coffee and work.

The shadow of a bird in flight brings life to her hands inscribed with the tattoo of a bird.

Our Plant-Human Connection

I hold this print up to the light to view the translucent Gampi paper used to print this Iris with palladium.

My artwork embraces our embeddedness in the natural world. With my fingers CARRESSING an Iris, like a honeybee seeking nectar, I see its forms. I rotate the Iris this way and that way to create with my enlarger camera-less 16X20 inch negatives. For me the IRIS is a landscape, an ecosystem in constant becoming, a landscape of transcendence.

I print my negatives with palladium, using sunlight to expose the thin, translucent gampi paper. As I look at one of my prints titled IRIS GEOMETRY, I see how the palladium emulsion is absorbed to reveal the depth of the image.