seeing/perception

During my month long Artist Residency at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts in 2022, I was reintroduced to Ann O’Hanlon through her book “seeing/perception, looking at the world through an artist’s eye”.

This little gem of a book provided a foundation for what emerged over the following weeks a the place where the seed of my art practice was sown. I came full circle to the young woman who had her whole life in front of her and the the mature woman with experience under her belt. I wasn’t sure what would emerge from my time at the base of Mt. Tamalpais in Cascade Canyon, but I knew I was going home to the place of my beginnings. A time to recollect thoughts and memories of the past forty-eight years. And what a journey it’s been…love, loss, birth, re-birth, sorrow, joy. A life well lived I would say. Passionate and fearless.

Ann O’Hanlon speaks to how we see our interior self and our relationship to place. She writes: “seeing is gathering of physical statistics outside of us through the instrument of the eye an involuntary mechanical act. perception is the gathering of consciousness from those outer things”.

Gathering of consciousness from those outer things…WOW.

We are so shaped by those ‘outer things’…what we do with that information is a process of discernment, digestion, transformation, integration. I think that’s why I love papermaking so much. I transform all that is outside through materiality into something new, something fresh and exciting.

This transformation of materials and imagination has kept me engaged in the art of making for fifty years. It’s hard to imagine so much time has passed, but here I sit at the beginning of the mystery of spring awakening in my treehouse studio with so much to look forward to.