Things Pile Up…all things visible and invisible. The year 2020 was extraordinary in its spectrum of ruptures—the collective human spirit struggled under the weight of death and burgeoning world fractures. During the remove of the pandemic, I found good use for the many magazines that had piled up in our home spaces over time.  I use cut and torn images from those accumulated magazines, now history pieces in themselves, in collage as exploratory process, gleaning slivers of culture and halted experience. Collage plays a double role of meditative practice of pure thought as well as independent entity and study for later paintings. My work is both deconstructive and reconstructive—in this instance, of torn society. I borrow color, content and shape to create pilings—two dimensional stacks—of redesigned matter that then become paintings. The paintings are philosophies as well as matters of art, obliquely referencing moments in art history, and social, cultural, and political events. As the work has progressed, it speaks as well to internal and external accumulation, release, and rebuilding. Arrangements of fragments depict lively and precarious balances, a dialogue between chaos and order, and unity of fragility and stability both in metaphor and surface content. The color is enlivened, vibrant, sometimes jazzy, intended to be transformative.