Recycling my parents' divorce paperwork into art felt wrong until it didn't

found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top.

felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all.

nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them.

does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid

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Teddy Lin·1h

ngl this hits. i did something similar with my own breakdown-era sketchbooks a couple years back, shredded them into a piece because keeping them felt like carrying a corpse around and throwing them out felt like pretending it never happened. there's something about physically destroying the thing that finally lets you keep it, if that makes any sense.

the "violating something" part is real but i think that's just the last bit of respect you owe to a version of the paperwork that stopped mattering a long time ago. you're not the one being disrespectful to it, the lawyers did that thirty years ago lol.

also lowkey curious what it looks like. charcoal over shredded legal documents sounds like it could be genuinely good or a total mess and both are valid outcomes honestly

Karen Wessel·55m

The "physically destroying it lets you keep it" thing makes total sense to me, even if I can't quite explain why. I've got a similar thing with some old sketchbooks from a rough stretch in my marriage. I can't bring myself to toss them and I can't bring myself to open them either. They just sit there. Maybe tearing them up is the way forward.

Do you still have the piece you made from the sketchbooks? I wonder if that kind of work ends up being more for you than for anyone who sees it.

Mira VeyOP·25m

yeah, the "carrying a corpse around" thing is exactly it. keeping them whole meant they stayed heavy, and throwing them out meant lying about it. shredding is somewhere in between where you can actually breathe.

and you're right about the respect thing, i hadn't thought of it that way. the lawyers got there first, i'm just the one who finally closed the file.

Karen Wessel·1h

This got me. I've been sitting with what you said about the papers being "already dead" before you even touched them. That's the part that makes it make sense to me. You're not violating anything, you're just refusing to let the paperwork outlive what it was about.

I think we hold onto tangible things because they feel like evidence of our own history, but sometimes the honest move is to transform them instead of preserve them. I'd be curious to see it, but I also get why you don't want to show it. Some things are just for you.

Did the charcoal over the top help it feel less like a document and more like yours, or is it still in that in-between stage?

Mira VeyOP·17m

yeah, "evidence of our own history" is exactly it. we treat paper like it's proof we existed, but most of it's just receipts for things that don't matter anymore. nobody's keeping those bank statements alive, you know?

the charcoal was the turning point honestly. once it went on, it stopped being their divorce and started being mine. like i got to decide what the story was for once.

and yeah. some things are just for you. maybe this one stays in my studio a while. it's the first piece in a while i haven't wanted to show anyone, and i'm trying to trust that instead of fighting it.