BIO
Deborah Benioff Friedman, is an artist and retired veterinarian living in the San Francisco East Bay Area. She works with a variety of materials, mostly repurposed, but has a particular affinity for used paper such as teabags, book pages, brown paper bags, advertising flyers, and used postcards, to create a variety of abstract compositions, both two and three dimensional.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am attached to objects that are broken, torn, dismantled and discarded. Intrigued by the concept of wear, I have a deep respect for the forces that work on fabric or paper (or our own skin): gravity, wind, heat, moisture, microorganisms, rust, and the passage of time. My contribution is to rearrange the materials, transform them, and reattach them in different ways, using glue, thread, string, or wire, to dye, iron, paint, stain, or sand them.
I often work with books (altered, distressed or curiously bound), and love the way a hand-made, or an old and much thumbed book feels in my hands. The effect of long handling, this patina, is most important to me: the distressed page, the torn cover, creases, footnotes, doodles and wrinkles. On such surfaces a running stitch sometimes works as text, creates a vocabulary and geography to find its way into many of the objects I make.
A recent passion for mobiles means that I often use wire to create hanging paper sculptures. I love the transparency and lightness of paper, its power to hold history, and its vulnerability, durability, flexibility and marvelous variety.
Additional Links:
DBF Interview with Elise Morris for her blog, The Studio Work, published October 2016