Violence, Abjection and Ecstasy

I've already shown some works from the Violence, Abjection and Ecstasy series here but I had some images of earlier works in the series that I thought I'd add. The original idea was to join the individual pieces of paper and sew large patterns over the lot, but the largest I made was a 4x4 grid - the size became too large to work with. The number of sheets that I had was also finite, and I wanted to try different patterns, so ended up making each sheet a separate work. All the paper is hand made, some has hair in it, some parts are made with grass, as well as other miscellaneous fibrous materials. They were all buried in compost with rusted metal objects, spices, pigments, etc., to allow them to randomly stain. Pieces were collaged together, coated with a layer of clear acrylic medium, then sewn with cotton and polyester thread. I stuck to a palette of earth tones for the thread to fit with the colours of the paper. Each individual sheet is approximately 16x16cm.