Memory Tourist in San Francisco

2022
Recycled paper pulp and steel wire
Heron Arts, San Francisco, CA

Memory Tourist in San Francisco combines part of my recent installations with new work, consisting of over 200 unique mobiles suspended in the gallery’s 400 sf atrium. The wire forms create line drawings in the air and connect colorful and airy “Cookies” which move in response to us when we walk by them and stir the air. 

To make these Cookies, I collect used photo-background paper from artists and photographers in my Brooklyn studio building. I break it down to pulp, and formulate it with bookbinders' glue into an air-dry clay.  The rich colors come directly from the colors of the donated paper; there are no added paints or pigments. I mix pulps to make additional colors and effects, by blending blue pulp and red pulp to make a purple clay, for example. Mushy pulps make homogeneous colors, while crumbly pulps have a stippled effect. Finely blended pulps form a smoother surface like macaroons while coarser pulps become bumpier like oatmeal cookies.

Over the last year I made mobiles for specific times and places, first for Cape Cod in May, then next for Vermont in November, and then this Spring for different neighborhoods in my hometown Brooklyn. Through my travels for these installations I began to think of the memory of the material - the paper.  The pulp retains the colors and the fibers it originally had in these mobiles, whose elements interact with one another as they swing, recreate relationships, and then part ways, like those who visit a place for pleasure. 

Photography: Shaun Roberts and Yuko Nishikawa