I started working with coffee filters in 2006, after I left one in my studio coffee pot for several weeks. I'd never bothered to keep a coffee filter around before - usually they're kind of gross and slimy after use, and I'd throw them away immediately, in order to make room for a new one. But this time, when I opened up the coffee pot and found the filter completely dried out - with a high-tide mark from where the grounds had rested, and a brown ring around the lip - the contrast between the paper's translucency and the dried grounds sparked something in my imagination. Right then, I saw the image of a mass of filters hanging in my huge, opaque window, lit from behind by the day light.
So as always happens at the start of a new piece, I started collecting. I saved every cone filter I used at home, and even got my co-workers to save them from our pot at work - I gathered size 2s and 4s, as well as bleached and unbleached filters, whatever I could find. It took six months of saving before I had enough filters to build my first piece, and half that time was spent experimenting with various fixatives (to keep the grounds from continuously shedding) and attachment techniques. I finally settled on tacking the filters together with a needle and thread, instead of sewing every edge - the trickiest part of making my work is always the practical aspect, figuring out how to actually build what I've imagined.
At this point, I have created three coffee filter pieces - a small wall-hanging piece, a set of 3 relatively-spherical objects, and a 5' wide wall piece, which was created specifically for Artomatic in 2008.
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