to tear

Artist friends consistently advise me, 'DO NOT tear up your work'.

TEAR or tear
/ter/ or /tîr/

To pull, To rip

An act of weeping 
a salty liquid 

Add tears to the page
recently read
recently pressed 
recently torn

Tear open the letter 
Tear open the wrapping 
Tear open the blouse 
Tear up the contract
Tear up the sidewalk 
Tear up the page 

Tear the cloth 
to wrap the wound

printed pages torn and a composite digitally printed image waiting to be torn

Pages that are being sorted are from several years of printing objects that carry or the odd ephemera being carried. Iconic brown paper bags, zip lock plastic bags, handled plastic bags, and woven bags (fibers and metals) are arranged, inked and printed. Pages for the book being assembled are originals or digitally printed versions of the originals. Each page the oddball long and narrow size of 17.5” x 7”.

Original work can sit in a drawer or it can be altered, torn to size to be assembled and held. In many ways better than on a wall, in a frame, behind glass.

Tearing fiber before twisting and attaching to text anchors.

The text held within the book being assembled is from my recent participatory performance, Slowly Moving With a Burden Bent. The score is a series of simple actions, each serving as a conversational intermediary. Its intent and outcome changes with the location and the prepared material that is being carried, torn and twisted before being anchored to text.

The simple invitation to tear became a revelation. Folks on the street who stopped to participate were introduced to a somatic understanding of becoming undone and reworked into something else, a poetic moment. Together as we tore fabric we speculated about how household habits have changed over time and wondered about practices of rag making and repurposing materials before or instead of discarding or passing them on.

As I am tearing printed pages and sorting them I am thinking of the tearing of fibers. Feeling the rift, the discomfort and the liberation.

CARRYING CARE, artist book. Closed 19” x 6.5” x .75” Center view, Two signatures falling open. Foil text found throughout the body of the work and the interior of handles.

This text documents the poetic response created by 43 participants.

After tearing and twisting fiber its ends were attached to text anchors. Reading the tangle at the end of the event revealed and collected the connections in a poetic response archived in this recent artists book (read aloud above).

It is a time of tearing up (sometimes with tears attached). Unmaking and reconsidering intentional gestures of gathering together and belonging to each other and the land.