Passages

Tête-à-Tête

                   Mixed Media, 24x30, 2019

It's been a long time since I last posted because I've been posting all my new work on Instagram. For the last two summers I've been working on a series entitled, "Passages". This series uses old letters, journal entries, photos and encaustic. I used to treasure all of the items used in my new body of work. Today I see everything as ephemeral. As a young artist I would never have felt the urge to share or use these personal items in a work of art, let alone do an entire project on the subject of the passages of my life. Today I feel so detached from it all. The person who wrote the letters and journal entries was a much younger Hillary. I used to see myself as such an individual, now I see that I am just like everyone else with the same hopes, desires and fears. 

Synapse

Mixed Media on board, 18x24, 2018

For 30 years my best friend and I talked about doing an art project with our correspondence. In the summer of 2018 the timing felt right. The boxes of letters had survived the Santa Rosa fires which had come within a seven minute walk from my house. Some of my paintings burned with the homes that were lost. The gallery I was showing all of my latest work in came within a block of burning down. Awareness of how close I had come to losing everything, as some of my friends and students, had made me want to use the letters and journals that had traversed the Atlantic and US several times over in my artwork. I spent the summer re-reading things I had not perused since I had written or received them. Memories flooded back but with a new perspective of someone who had seen years of patterns, someone who had a detachment from the initial pain and excitement that was originally expressed or received.

It feels life-affirming to work with this raw material. To let go of the boxes of ephemera and recycle them. It's a transformative project which I feel will lead me in a new direction. Elements of painting, drawing, puppetry, photography and sound, all art forms I embrace are encompassed in this project.