In the Beginning

It started with wanting more light in the fall of 2018. I began to collect mirrors to reflect the teasing sun my garden apartment gets. Then I found dozens of cheap sheets of 8x10 glass, and started reading Carl Jung. I spent a lot of time thinking about my shadow, my nearest neighbor. I talked about it with my friends. I told a man who didn’t love me about it, and he asked if I’d thought about therapy. I told a therapist from Wyoming about it and he asked if I had anywhere to put my shadow, to explore her and let her be free.

I received mirrors as gifts from strangers, and people off of Craigslist. Whenever I told them about what I was doing, to the extent that I understood how to explain myself, they encouraged me to keep going and wanted to see what happened to their discarded glass. An engineer rebuilding his house gave me several 6 foot long by 4 feet wide old windows for free. He even taught me how to score and cut glass, and what drill bits to use, when the time comes.

Mirror Studies became an investigation of the shadow, the unconscious, my perception of myself, and glass. All mirrors are made of glass. And glass is the beginning.

Mirror Studies is an ongoing project

of painting and mixed media on glass,

and self-voyeuristic films

about these pieces.

I wandered around a craft scrap store and saw dozens of sheets of glass, different sizes. In my head, without understanding or confusion, I saw them laid against all the mirrors in my house, and tracing my image, hard to see steadily without closing an eye, looking at myself in the eye, capturing a version of myself (is this possible?)//you can never see yourself twice. You can barely do it once.

“Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter.”

— Scientific American, 2007