Panya Clark Espinal

Old Ideas is comprised of over sixty objects culled from the artist’s small home-based studio which had come to contain both the remains of fifteen years of her circuitous makings and her personal collection of sources of inspiration.

I had come to the point where I would enter the studio with the full intention of moving forward with my work, my new ideas, only to be submerged with my love of the past, my attachment to and nostalgia for the old ideas which I still deeply loved but had been incapable of bringing to complete fruition. It was becoming impossible to move forward.

While I had moments of wanting to simply ‘light a match’ to it all, I decided to completely empty the space and simply crate its contents for storage. In so doing, I began laying out things on the floor… piecing together a collage which became a tapestry of this time in my life.

Two beautiful boxwood plants which I had ‘compost picked’ became the warp and weft of the tapestry’s fabric.

I realized I was burying the work, putting it to rest, but in a way that, I hoped, would allow it to be witnessed and honoured. I wanted its death to feed both life and my practice of living.