Paper Letters by Katrina Craig

Opening Event featuring Katrina Craig: September 13 at MHC Gallery at 7:30pm

Indigo Dye drop-in workshop with Katrina Craig on Saturday, September 21 at 12:30-2pm on the lawn at Canadian Mennonite University.

Exhibition Runs: Sept. 13 - Oct 26; Mon-Fri 830-430 and Saturdays 12-5

Paper Letters explores the stories we tell in order to make sense of our experiences. These stories become the building blocks of our identity and shape our perceptions of events happening all around us, what psychologists refer to as “narrative identity.” If we wish to meaningfully transform ourselves and the way we see the world, we must first deconstruct our stories. From the familiar and sometimes difficult raw materials that remain, we can create new narratives and new identities.

Katrina Craig has been journaling and hand-lettering script since childhood as an act of therapeutic release,, giving physical form to her thoughts and feelings. In Paper Letters, Katrina deconstructs, disfigures, and distorts these “sloppy” stream of consciousness writings - old journals, hand-lettered transcriptions of emails and instant messages, and letters written but never sent. The material’s transformation from something smooth, rigid, flat, and fixed in dimension into something irregular, flexible, and three-dimensional parallels the shifting of Katrina's stories. Through the repetitive processes of cutting, folding, stitching, and pleating, Katrina transforms the original text to the point of redirecting its power; stringing together the remnants to create something new.