My mother smoked. Usually in the dining room of her home, often late into the night. After she died I was cleaning the house and the nicotine stained walls and ceilings were very difficult to clean or paint over. That was the moment that years later led to the creation of the nicotine works. My mother died by suicide in 2003, I started making the works in nicotine in 2007. And I wasn’t just thinking of the stained walls, I was thinking of her, I was thinking of her alone, up all night ruminating over her past. We all inherit family snapshots and in time we forget who anyone was, the narratives evaporate with the deceased family members. That’s why I’ve decontextualized these often banal photographic archives into these works of art, they become elevated as works of art, and by using the nicotine, the narratives become preserved and revealed too, or at least pointed to.

With the nicotine works the silkscreens are placed over the top of box–like constructions that imitate the walls and ceilings of my mother’s dining room. Ashtrays filled with lit and smoldering cigarettes are placed into the bottom of the boxes beneath the screens. The nicotine contained in the smoke from the cigarettes passes through the dot matrix in the silk mesh and slowly the paper becomes stained with the image embedded in the screen. Although nicotine, by itself, is colorless, when combined with oxygen, it turns yellow, often accurately described as sepia, though I prefer to describe the color as a tarnished gold, sepia might suggest a more conventional photo process and obscures the connection to the more potent medium of the nicotine.

Despite the use of a commercial screen-printing technique each work is unique. The heat from the cigarettes slowly melts the accumulating nicotine into the mesh and burns out the image and destroys the screen, only one can be made, also, unlike printmaking techniques where the ink is pushed through the screen with a squeegee, the smoke passing through the mesh can be manipulated by the number of cigarettes smoldering at the same time beneath the screen while also allowing the cigarettes to be moved beneath the images so that the dark and light values in each of the images are controllable which is more in line with techniques used in drawing where erasures and pressure and the quantity of the medium used can account for subtle differences in the rendered image.

The images are made by repetitively building up layers of nicotine, depending on the size of the work, hundreds or even thousands of cigarettes are required to make a single work.