The Architect's Daughter

Growing up, the drafting table was a strange contraption lording over the basement and over the crown of her then small head.  As she slowly came to understand the table's function, it came to teach her that A) work and home are inseparable, and B) the world is flat.  Skyscrapers collapse into thin piles of layered printer paper and torn, pen-marked transparency sheets.  Mountains and forests reduce to stacked shapes.  Fathers compile into cramped calendars.

Now the early lessons are thoroughly embedded.  Art and architecture are inseparable in her mind.  The easel is her own table, similar to a draughtsman's and yet completely different in the ways that matter.  She is not a draughtswoman or a designer.  Instead, exactly like children imitate their parents naïvely, she plays at being an architect, mimicking the actions but doing them backwards.  Architects use flat means to create real objects.  She takes real objects and recreates them as flat.

Buildings, trees, cliffs, clouds, the figure, the animal, love: they are as substantial as shadows on the empty playroom floor.  The subject of the image isn't important.  It's about experiencing that three-dimensional subject through flatness, about being immersed in flatness, about fasting from life and repeating the ritual until there is finally a paper girl who can link hands with the paper father.

It's about being the architect's daughter.