Papercuts - Paperback

by Melinda R. Smith (Author)

On November 11, 2018, my father passed away at the age of 84. I immediately flew to Michigan from Los Angeles, where I lived, to be with my family. My father was beloved, and it was a great loss and a very sad time. Following the funeral, I decided to stay for Thanksgiving, and, following that, I decided simply to stay in Michigan through the Christmas holiday and keep my newly widowed mother company. Although I was more than happy to stay in Michigan for an extended visit, it was a long time away from my studio, and I wondered how I would occupy myself in the many days away from it. I am and always have been an artist who is held together by her work. Without it, I am restless and untethered from myself. And so it was an earnest fear that I would not have anything to work on for close to two months.

One night in late November, I had a dream that I was working with colored paper. The next morning I went to a local crafts store (there were not proper art stores where my parents lived) and bought a fistful of colored cardstock, some scissors and glue. After a brief attempt at abstraction, I landed on an idea: It would be a Christmas gift for my nephew's new baby, my father's namesake, Daniel: a diptych of a lion and a tiger. I learned the craft as I went, and I was very pleased with the results. But even as I worked on my jungle scenes, I conceived of the real phase of the work, what I would do when I returned to Los Angeles. I was excited and couldn't wait to get to it. I would take the childlike visuals of the colorful cutouts, not unlike Colorforms in their way, and apply one of my favorite themes to them: female despair.

My first four cutouts were of various methods of suicide. I knew the theme was dark, but its appeal to me lay in its juxtaposition with such a childlike medium. My belief was that the humor of how it was represented would soften the edges of what was represented. I started on the first four as soon as I returned to L.A. at the end of December 2018. In early February of 2019, I was in the L.A. Art Show with Coagula Curatorial. We decided to show the cutouts, and they seemed to be something of a hit. People appeared to be drawn to them from afar as though, perhaps, to some sort of recollected childhood trope, only to be surprised by what they saw closeup. The Suicide series sold before I had a chance to photograph them properly.

From there I went on to portray more dark themes, each series represented by four different cutouts. The goal was to make 100 in one year, and although I came close to achieving that goal, eventually I had to swerve from the original theme of despair. At some point I became so steeped in the nostalgia of old TV shows I truly feared I'd never break out of it. At any rate, I spent the entirety of 2019 at work at a small table in the corner of my studio, making my paper cutouts with the joy and abandon of unassailable concentration (one might say a bit like a child lost in play), all the while entirely certain that the original dream had been given to me by my father as a final gift and token of his love.