I wanted to recollect and reconnect the pieces that from the near-complete and violent
destruction of an identity. The process of destruction and its metaphor to the hatred and
fear of an entire group of people inspired me to reconstruct a piece that would symbolize
the destroyed identity without wasting anything—not the violence of the act or the debris
that was left over. Just as individual identities or group identities are formed from both
the good and bad experiences of an existence, I formed the art piece’s identity by retaining
well-defined aspects of that which was destroyed—in this case, actual text and unaltered
material from books—and combining them with new, altered elements, including
handmade paper and painted collage material made from the vandalized books. The
overall piece is a stronger, more assured identity that overcame a former incarnation’s
hate-induced destruction without sacrificing any part of what it was before.
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