From time to time, there can be a brief fissure in daily experience. It’s sharp, decisive moment when you glimpse that which has always been perfectly hidden. The form is unanticipated—a shaft of light in an alley, a small hand movement, a look into a stranger’s eye. It is heartbreaking and rapturous, disquieting, and true. The interruption heals as quickly as it forms, and although you feel it in your gut, unless you believe it in your heart, it disappears without a trace.

These ruptures are the motivation that propels my work. Although I use sophisticated tools, I see my work in the tradition of women’s lap craft. My fascination with the handmade, the awkward and sentimental is at odds with the contemporary medium with which I work. I find there exists a dynamic play between practical technology and rhapsodic subject matter.

This ongoing series, Specimens, is a series of hybrid images—the final form is inkjet print on watercolor paper, with wax. They initiated as photograms that I re-photographed onto Polaroid film, with which I then make an emulsion transfer. I then scan the image and print it onto archival watercolor paper. At this point, I dip the image in wax, to mute any sharp edges.

“The small images look like diaphanous scarves that Isadora Duncan might have tossed toward the sun and danced under as they drifted down. They may remind you of photographs because their fluid shapes make them look like brisk movements frozen in an instant. Their tissue-like folds give them depth, as though three-dimensional objects have been captured in two.” [Bill Rodriguez, from The Providence Phoenix “Sheri Wills’ Evocative Specimens” January 25–31, 2002]

Sheri Wills is a video and digital media artist, currently an associate professor of art at The University of Rhode Island. She holds an MFA in filmmaking and an MA in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Regus London Film Festival, and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam.