This piece grew out of an assignment to photograph things that looked like letters. We went on a treasure hunt through Providence and found all the letters in its gritty landscape. I was looking for a way to display the images together and naturally came up with blocks. Turning the images into grayscale and then monochromatic primary and secondary colors, I printed them on heavy paper to create the first set of blocks. In phase 2 of the urban alphabet series, I dyed flannel in the same colors and then printed the grayscale images through a solvent transfer onto the fabric, which I sewed into cubes.
I was struck by how incongruous these images were to the iconic sweetness of children’s alphabet blocks, and it has led me to other ideas about images in an unexpected context and how the context can change or amplify meaning. A baby blanket quilted with images of environmental, global and economic peril, for example, called “Heirloom.”
