I’m a collector; A collector of letters, notes, photographs, newspaper clippings, and childhood drawings and paintings. Other artifacts such as stamps, menus, subway cards, and tickets may also find their way into the myriad stacks of paperwork in my room. The disorganized child who could never find anything slowly morphed into a more organized person in an effort to ward off my mom’s propensity to throw things away.
Once the Age of the Internet and social media took over, the letters and cards arriving in the mail diminished. It is because I realized that letters were growing to be a less important form of communication that these documents became even more important to me. In my current work, I combine the artifacts that I have collected and layer them in such a way that pattern and color will provide a relevancy to viewers. As the viewer looks beyond, very often a meaningful letter from my childhood begins to emerge as a focal point as the color and pattern recede into the background. Preservation is important to me and by reworking the artifacts, I can illustrate that letter writing and childhood art are personal, enduring, and universal. |
© by Shelby Hanson. All rights reserved.