[shorter]

I make coverings and other things with discarded textile, paper, and sometimes with found materials. Obsessively crafted and super tactile, my work takes the form of densely stitched quilts, dissected maps, book-like structures, altered garments, and other various devices from miniature to installation scale. I consider my art-making to be a material practice of attention——I track everyday arrangements of so-called ordinary life and twist, fold, project them into alternative dimensions.

[longer]

I consider my work to be a material practice of attention. I try to capture the feelings of systems we belong to but can't always see.

The things I make are double-edged. They are so-called ordinary things projected into other dimensions. They are often constituted from waste streams and offcuts of existing systems. They are made to be seen and handled from multiple sides. They have fronts and backs, insides and outsides. They open and close, fold and unfold. They are obsessively tactile. And they meander across scales, from global logistics to the tiniest domestic detail.

I play primarily with discarded textiles and paper, and sometimes with found materials. Textiles I stain, stretch, pull, wrinkle, wrap, stitch, and tear between abstract and everyday dimensions and processes. With paper, I cut, rip, shred, and pulp its tangled associations with administration, identification, and truth-telling but also with secrecy, forgery and fiction. Other materials I occasionally find and follow down rabbit holes into territories of all various shades of grey.

—Jess Blaustein