The paper attachments that showed up on the drawings last week feel to me like building; they suggest gutters or shelves - something architectural that holds or catches and perhaps clogs.  I'm piling small strips of paper in some of them.

This series increasingly seems like studies for work to be constructed, which is new for me (as is being without a studio ... not a coincidence, I'm sure).  In addition to working with the gutters, I'm making tears in the paper as part of the sewing-and-knotting process; the tears echo the cutting into drywall that I started in 2008 but haven't had space to pursue.

Liz Sweibel, 2010
Detail

Liz Sweibel, 2008

I can become intensely aware of my self as I work, and see myself execute these tiny, laborious, precise acts in a dogged, somewhat surgical effort to build a graceful, simple, secure place for valueless shards of paper and leftover thread.  I'm compelled to absurd acts of caretaking that are deeply meaningful for me; all my work bears traces of it.  Sorting through stuff on my studio table this morning, I found some notes from the proposal I wrote for the "Day Job" exhibit at The Drawing Center.

That job came to feel like the hollowest caretaking; no wonder my artwork suffered.  The irony, of course, is that the work I do with discards feels more authentic than the work I did at that college.  My notes say "College Inc.," a reference to a very disturbing Frontline segment.  The DOE's gainful employment crusade may be a too-broad attack on the for-profit industry (LIM, where I now teach, shares nothing with those schools), but if that's what it takes to protect people from being preyed on by scam colleges, so be it.