Studio / Process

Cathections are built through a slow process of cutting, folding, weaving, assembling, painting, repairing, and arranging found photographic material and other fragments.

Printed images provide a vast store of surfaces, textures, colors, light, and illusion. They allow small sculptures to make visual claims that cannot rationally be true.

Each Cathection is made at a precarious scale. A torn edge, visible seam, misplaced shadow, or poorly chosen fragment can collapse the illusion. The work depends on a careful tension between flatness and objecthood: the image must remain legible as photographic material while beginning to behave as sculpture.

Once made, Cathections are gathered into larger structures: grids, collections, fields, supports, boxes, and environments. The process moves from image to object, from object to collection, and increasingly from collection into space.

© 2026 Deborah Kraft