During the 10 year period that I lived on the edge of Detroit’s Eastern Market I’ve had car windows smashed out while parked in front of my loft 7 different times. Each time I would collect the broken autoglass, familiarly called “Detroit diamonds”. The ground up tires were from a failed process in undergrad where I was chopping up auto tires and processing them through a hand crank meat grinder. The abaca paper pulp was beaten using my friend Meg Heeres’ Hollander beater.

The three materials come together as sheets of paper that resemble desiccated skin or rawhide pieces of glass poking through. At the time of making this work I had been in 4 major car accidents, and this was a reflection on the phenomenon of having tiny shards of broken glass get embedded in your skin that over time work their way out, sometimes weeks after the car accident.

— Andy T