The triptych idea is not coming together in a way that feels right at this moment. I’m trying to take a step back from all of the detail, and think more broadly.

One of the things I appreciate about papercutting as an art form, at least in the way I tend to practice it, is that it limits my options. I don’t use lots of color – I’m limited to two colors most of the time. I am forced to create the designs in a way that links every piece of paper with every other piece of paper – I don’t use glue and I don’t allow my pieces to separate from each other. I think that my art benefits from these restrictions, and in some ways it reminds me to focus and distill.

I’ve suddenly come up with a new design idea, very different from all of the ideas I’ve been considering thus far. The original text I was considering, the Yiddish text from the shas tehineh, specifically reminds g!d and us to free captives and people who are imprisoned, and it makes the connection to Joseph and his imprisonments. He was thrown into a pit by his brothers, just like we throw Black men into prison, though they are our brothers. The pit and the jail are the same thing, a dark and unfair place of human and familial betrayal. I want to bring the text back as a larger feature than I’ve been thinking in other designs, not as a side-note. And I want to call attention to this parallel between “us” and “them,” Joseph our ancestor and the Black people of today who we are imprisoning unjustly.

This design idea involved a deep pit, a man, prison bars, and the Yiddish text. I’m working on sketches to see how this can work. And I have to study the Yiddish in more detail; it’s long and I have to extract the right part of the text (right words, right focus, right length).

If you want to see the text, use the online viewer on the Yiddish Book Center website to read Shas tehine rav peninim: mit fiele perushim un mesholim in Ivri Taytsh, and look for book page 181.