Through material experimentation, North Carolina artist Maya Freelon taps into her rich, creative heritage to create work that is both fragile and resilient. Freelon’s use of tissue paper as a medium was a discovery that she describes as a “beautiful accident”. After finding a colorful cache of water damaged tissue paper in her grandmother’s basement, Freelon was drawn to the bleeding patterns and color migrations created from the watermarks interacting with ink. This creative discovery opened new doors for the artist who continues to create alchemy between her material and the migration of ink, drawing conceptual parallels between color and the migration of Black bodies. Using a mono-print process that transfers tissue ink onto new substrates, she adds another layer of dimension to material that is otherwise deemed nonfunctional. The prints reflect a variety of expressionist processes including spinning tissue paper and ink on a potter's wheel and other manipulations of the material that yield bold, energetic, gestural marks. In other works she layers archival images and photography into the prints which incorporate a narrative component to the abstracted works. Her sculptural interventions draw on craft traditions like quilting, where Freelon upcycles tissue paper that she used to create her prints and transforms the material into large-scale sculptural quilts.
Deconstruction and reconstruction have become fundamental elements of her practice that reinforce resourcefulness and community, bringing to mind the famous quote, “many hands make light work.” Quilting, the process of taking scraps of material and creating functional objects is a process that’s communal and grounded in pre-loved items. Freelon abstracts this craft, taking unconventional materials that are imbued with the same spirit and transforming them into visual metaphors for resilience, persistence, and the embrace of change. Her sculptural works push boundaries of material and ink that refuse to be confined to a canvas. Instead, her tissue quilts take on a life of their own, evoking an ephemerality that runs counter to the functionality and utility of traditional quilts. Their beauty lies in their impermanence.