At long last, I have made a new scroll! This is the eleventh scroll in the series, which began in 2014. For the past two years, I have mostly been experimenting with other forms, but I wanted to return to this series after spending time reflecting on my work and practice. I recently started reading the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Though it’s been two years since I made a scroll, I still feel interested in their apparent purposelessness, an idea Odell explores in her book. Odell argues that we are increasingly asked to be productive or transparent. Within the art world, I think this translates to the ubiquity of easy to read, logical works. That said, I don’t think of this series as meaningless or arbitrary.
The repeating pattern in this scroll comes from a quilt block. In a sense, this work on paper becomes a safety blanket—something cozy or alluring yet strikingly different from its surroundings.
Scroll XI, 2019. Acrylic paint on paper, approximately 48 by 198 inches.