Her colorful works undulate like hanging tapestries or wiggle playfully up the wall. A vibrating color field is made of thousands of small red, pink, orange, and purple pieces of handmade paper. Other paper pieces have been cast into shapes resembling small vessels or sea creatures growing on a surface.
Lerma says, “I have repetitive longings. I am process driven. For me, making is an act of devotion, discipline, dedication and something I cannot stop doing.
“For the past two years, I have focused exclusively on paper: exploring and expanding my experience of what the medium can become. The act of making paper is by nature repetitive, meditative and escape. It is also an attempt to control. For the work in the Repetitive Longings series, paper becomes the text, the paint – the flat sheet transformed into a larger whole. I make thousands of paper pieces which are either cast into forms and shaped into a larger mass through the process of accumulation, or the sheets are individually watercolored, waxed and sewn to linen or fixed to a rigid surface. Quite simply, this work is about the joy and escape of making and the pleasure derived watching the transformational
qualitites of a single unit when acculumated in mass."