Advanced Fiber Studio (Highlights)
My art is a celebration of the narrative that occurs when the ordinary is infused with a small dose of the ethereal. Filling space with vibrant color, a variety of textures, complex patterns, and hand-worked surfaces, I extend an invitation to embark on a whimsical adventure full of things strange and familiar to encounter.
Just like storybooks are composed of many words crafted to create places, characters, and conversations, I compose my narratives from numerous pieces of intricately cut paper, hand embroidery and textural variety, all layered to replicate or imply the landscapes and phenomena of the earth. Plants spread deep detailed roots, a rain cloud is full of countless numbers of raindrops, hundreds of feathers make up a single bird. In creating fictitious handmade worlds I hope that the joyful labor of my process inspires reflection on the intricacy and beauty of our own world.
Flight, breath underwater, invisibility and transformation are all everyday happenings. It is only when these practices are reassigned to inhabit unexpected bodies or actions does non-fiction become fantasy. In my stories, humans take flight, large flowers fall from the sky and twenty six birds are arranged in a congregation that would never meet in the wild; these magical occurrences are all tiny tweaks in the universe that make for big stories.
The weaving of the familiar with the unknown offers opportunity to step through an imaginative portal and enter the land inside one’s head, the city beyond the clouds, the castle under the rug or anywhere and everywhere else the mind compels us to adventure.