A few days ago, Neatorama featured a papercut piece by Annie Vought that immediately fascinated me -- it looked like a handwritten note, but it was actually a finely crafted cutout mimicking one of those relics of bygone days, middle school, passing pieces of college-ruled paper between classes to your best friends, scrawling impetuous thoughts in a pink sparkly hand. Vought discusses the series on her Web site:
Handwritten records are fragments of individual histories. In the penmanship, word choice, and spelling the author is often revealed in spite of him/herself. A letter is physical confirmation of who we were at the moment it was written, or all we have left of a person or a time.
I have been working with cut out correspondence for the past four years. I meticulously recreate notes and letters that I have found, written, or received by enlarging the documents onto a new piece of paper and intricately dissecting the negative spaces with an Exact-o knife. The handwriting and the lines support the structure of the cut paper, keeping it strong and sculptural, despite its apparent fragility.
The piece above really resonated with me: in full, it reads "I was all of 25 at the time with out a clue to my future, hindsight doesn’t make the view any clearer except where one begins to get a sketchy outline of life by discovering what it isn’t."
Well, I am now all of 27 (My birthday was yesterday! I accept belated gifts, baked goods, and well wishes!). I'm not sure what that means, and I'm as surprised as you are that I've made it this far. Here's to a new year of art, writing (Did I mention? More than 16,000 words for my little NaNoWriMo pet! Most of them are terrible, but I'm ahead of schedule!), and trying to discern a hazy picture of the way I want things to be.