The Assembly

Mackenzie Perras // Overwrite, or Each thing is a palimpsest of its many material transformations waiting to be deciphered

While my work often uses recycled materials and garbage produced by my painting process, I wanted to find a way to repurpose the 100's of pounds of drawings, sketches, research and studio notes I've built up over the years. Through multiple processings, I constructed this piece through primary documents destined for the landfill. It is a recuperative material flow that directly reduces my footprint, and asks us in multiple ways what transformative recycling looks like. By framing the piece as a palimpsest and leaving small corners of text and image still visible, it invites a deeper reading and opens us to the normally invisible material flows all around us.

To create this piece, I began by watching nature to understand some of the ways material flows work. When organic material has outlived its use, its broken down by various mechanisms like fungi, erosion, and chemical interaction. I therefore tried to process the documents in multiple, experimental ways. Some I cut into filaments and hardened with acrylics. Some I broke down into pulp using solvents and applied as mash. Some were applied slowly, layer by layer between layers of paint and built up like sedimentary rock. Some were gooped in with baubles of polyurethane foam. Once I'd created a dynamic surface, I began over a period of months to sink paint into it. What does sustainability look like? Does recycling have an aesthetic? How does nature recombine material flows? These questions were bouncing around my head as I created the colour story and final composition. Finally, I coated everything in generous layers of damar resin (produced from pine sap) to infuse the whole thing an organic component. I then varnished and UV stabilized to create as archival a piece as possible from the materials used. Work was completed from 2020-2021.