1,000 Square Feet Project

During the 2021 summer, I visited a coastal site in Florida to create a group of 100 prints to add to my project “1,000 Square Feet.” While this is a long-term project, I create work in site-specific groups of 100 prints. To date, I have created print groups representing shorelines in Maine in 2017, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and most recently Benin, West Africa in 2019. These sections represent localized and global communities. The installation grows in scale with each new site that is added. This work is a non-commercial endeavor – it is installation-based and is not for sale. The work was recently exhibited as part of my solo exhibition, “Surface Tension” at NJCU galleries, September through December 2021. 

The project focuses on utilizing place-based information as source material throughout the process. Each print is 12 x 12 inches and is created on handmade paper made with collected local water and monoprinted with imagery created from anthropogenic detrital artifacts (plastic debris) that is gathered on site. Abaca fiber paper sheets were made with water directly sourced from the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. I walked the beach, looking for pieces of human made artifacts and detritus to use as source material for a collection of shaped monoprinting plates.

Once the site-specific phase of the project was completed, I returned to my studio in Newark NJ to process each sheet of paper through the remaining steps. Each sheet was marbled with suminagashi inks, strategically mixed to resemble the color of the Florida coastline. I created shaped monoprinting plates, based on my localized collection of plastic debris from Florida, which were printed using watercolor paints at Guttenberg Arts printshop.