Kristen Miller's artworks are delicate compositions in which she uses beads that are repetitively stitched onto the surface of tissue paper, glassine, or fruit wrappers. The beads in Miller's work resemble seeds or cells and often take on organic shapes. Miller's use of stitching becomes an act of drawing, coding, or writing.
For the past few years I've been thinking about an essay by Annie Dillard titled "The Wreck of Time." Posing the question of the relevance of the individual to the multitudes present and past, she quotes statistics of various populations and the historic and nature-driven events that have shaped their outcomes. We are asked to imagine the sheer numbers of people who have gone before us, those who inhabit the world now, and those who will follow. She reminds us of how we humans count and analogizes succeeding generations to waves rising from the sea, "billions of individuals at a time; we see them dwindle and vanish." These vast numbers are reflected in the ideas behind my artwork relating the weight of water and the lightness of air to the space created by the passing of time.
