Hello,
I am fascinated and inspired by nature and the marks and patterns I find by looking quite closely at the objects I gather: pebbles, feathers, flowers, leaves – and the larger world of trees, rivers, ice formations.
I am also drawn to colours that sing, colour that comforts, colour that invites touch.
I believe textiles – fabric, colour, and stitch – connects us all to each other and to our foremothers in a significant way whether we know it consciously or not. The traditions of making – from practical necessity, or a need for beauty stands behind us as women for untold generations. My work pushes the traditional forms of embroidery, though still at heart is marks on cloth made with a thread carried by a needle.
My process begins with printing or painting directly on fabric – intuitive mark making using well-used or discarded textiles—old sheets or ‘dead stock’ and applying textile ink & dye to create abstract random lines and shapes. I build up layers and look for sections to isolate that will form the basis of the final composition for stitching.
My recent work is small in scale inviting the viewer to come closer and really see.
Traditional, radical, so often dismissed and devalued, women's work is claiming its place in the hierarchy of significant values & I want my work to help people to see, feel and understand that -- to reconnect with this form of expressive media.
Why Textiles?
The moment I walked into the textile studio as a college student, I was home. Before even doing a single lesson or project, I knew I belonged there.
I am endlessly fascinated with fabric construction, methods of applying colour, design, pattern so it comes to life, with stitch in all its forms - surface embroidery & embellishment, piecing & quilting, combining elements.
Textiles connect me to women all over the world and across time. Women have held the needle out of necessity, out of love, out of pride, out of a need for more beauty in their lives. Women stitch with love, sometimes with grief and pain, to show off or to conceal their emotions.
Work on fabric whether large or small, simple or enormously complicated, has the power to draw one closer - to feel it without touching because our fingers 'know' what it feels like. I love that about successful art - it can be one thing at a distance & explodes into so many more things as I get closer & closer, pulling me in with awe.
