The Anatomy of a Rescue:
My process is a physical intervention. It begins where society’s stories are intended to end: in the waste stream. Having served twice as an artist-in-residence at landfills, I stopped seeing waste as a metaphor and started seeing it as a primary resource. I spend my time in the architecture of disposal and standing in the middle of what society has rejected to find the treasures that were minutes away from being buried forever.
I source my materials from landfill-bound thrift store discards and library "free" bins. These are places where books are often treated as refuse simply because they are "damaged" or no longer fit a tidy shelf. In these piles, I am not looking for pristine collectors' items. I am looking for the survivors. I hunt for the books that have been deemed too far gone to save, recognizing that a tattered cover or a water-stained page is not a defect, but a witness to a story that refused to be quiet. By intercepting these objects before they become literal landmass, I ensure that their history and the human hands that touched them continue to circulate rather than disappear.
The Banned &
The Beloved:
I curate these materials to ensure the soul of the book stays intact. Every piece I make carries its own history, which I record on a physical library check-out card used as the earring backing. On the front of the card, I handwrite the book's title, author, and publication year to introduce the story. On the back, I do the same for the specific salvaged volume used for the internal pages. This allows you to carry the exact lineage of the tiny books you are wearing.
For my Banned Book section, I am stepping in to stop an act of erasure. When I find a title like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Color Purple, or Rubyfruit Jungle, I am saving a story that someone tried to throw away. These earrings contain the actual pages of a banned text. By turning these suppressed words into something you can wear, I move them out of a silenced corner and back into the world where they can be seen again.
For everything else, I salvage Beloved children’s classics that have been loved almost to pieces. I hunt for the copies with broken spines and the tiny, handwritten notes left by the kids or parents who read them last. I specifically look for illustrated editions by artists like E.H. Shepard or Quentin Blake to use for the inside pages. This way, a sliver of an original drawing, a honey pot, or a "Happy Birthday" note can show up within the tiny books. Even the smallest fragment carries its own life story with it.