Shatterproof

This series started with a photograph that I took of a puddle of water, at the entrance to the woods near my home. It was many months into the pandemic, and each morning I took my toddler daughter on a long walk, the same route, over and over. The smallest of details became our world: the ripples of a puddle, the veins of fallen leaves, the ice patches trapping bubbles underneath.

I thought about surfaces. Our neighborhood was so quiet. You wouldn’t know, watching the silent movie of our walks, that we were living through a global pandemic. You wouldn’t know how isolated I was, how grateful to be safe, how scared that we might not be. How scared to return to the house and see the daily news, the avalanche of deaths.

 

Photographs alone were just the surface. In the afternoons, in Photoshop, I layered my paintings onto the photographs, drew on the photographs, and cut through them. Gradually, I noticed a recurring pattern in the final images. The webbing that shatterproof glass makes when it cracks. The pattern of cracking that distributes stress through the glass sheet, leaving it both whole and broken at the same time. The way the glass kept something out, protected something, but in the process was fundamentally altered, indelibly fractured. The way that the world can still be seen even through fractured glass, but not in quite the same way.