Impossible Journey (installation in progress)
About the Project
Impossible Journey is a shaped paper wall sculpture that I was driven to make after a year of restrictions during the covid pandemic. It conceptually represents all the places I haven’t been able to go and things I couldn’t do in the year before. My challenge was to create the nonexistent events in my imagination and pour them into the paper. It is a developmental installation, in that my purpose was to challenge the materials and my skills to understand what was possible (and impossible) with both, and to work at a scale much larger than I’ve done before.
The installation fills a 10’h x 20’w wall in my studio in Redwood City, CA. The paper is variously folded, crumpled, torn, curved, braided, crocheted, and interwoven to create the multitude of forms within it and attached directly to the wall. It comprises three rolls of 60-m long, 1-m wide sekishu kozo (Japanese paper), one in 15 gsm and two in 25 gsm weights. The one limitation I gave myself was that I couldn’t tear a roll of paper into pieces - each had to be shaped and put on the wall continuously - representing the continuous path of any journey in both space and time.
The smaller standalone works in the last photographs are studies that I used to develop various techniques and paper forms subsequently adapted for the wall installation.