Krista Dragomer

This body of work began as I was staring out at a frozen Lake Erie from the meditation room at Hospice of the Western Reserve, in Cleveland Ohio. The vision of an unmoving lake called up a tension between stasis and change, between surface and what lives below. Imagery started to emerge. A few weeks after my father passed, I fell in love with a woman and my life changed. And so I began to create work by making rubber molds from our bodies, hers and mine, and arranging them into topographies inspired by the work of Marie Tharp, the geologist and oceanographer to first map the ocean floor.  The first pieces charted the uncalculable spaces between these three points: the bodies of two women in midlife traversing loss and change and continents to meet, and a woman in the 1950’s drawing maps of the deepest places she could imagine, from data she was barred from collecting herself. Three women bodying the unseen places and forces that shape our intimacies, our movements, our grief and our love.

As I pressed wet paper pulp into the molds, other forms began to emerge. Shapes from a distant past or a possible future. Shapes we, humans, might become, that we became, and undid. Posthumanist forms both figure and landscape. Forms that feel like artifacts from an alternate timeline, telling a posthumanist story of intradependent, emergent life, queer life. Fragmented hands held between basalt, barnacled to coral. Ribs becoming ridges, hips becoming seamounts. Blues giving way to a mineral darkness, to a blackness before everything.

Working with paper pulp is a process of discovery. The fibers float in a slurry of water and pigment and in the sedimentation process, something takes shape. The dry form evidences the movement of water and time and comes to hold a position between its previous motion and current stillness. These dimensional works are made with the materials of drawing—paper, graphite, charcoal, ink, wax—activating sculptural space while remaining in conversation with the wall, the rectangle, the propositional gesture of drawing. Like drawing, these paper works hold a line lightly, suggesting a shape or place for the lines to travel to without delimiting their possibilities.

pigmented cast cotton and linen paper sculpture

inquiries: studio.kristadragomer@gmail.com