Advanced Fiber Studio (Highlights)
My work focuses primarily on a meticulous fabrication in drawing and fibers installation. While my drawings are habitually intricate pen and ink illustrations with an elegiac narrative, the materiality of my fibers work is continuously being modified in material, dimension and tactility. The relationships between woman to love, woman to motherhood, and woman to nature are the overarching motif in of my practice. An interest in the classical interpretation of the delicate feminine figure instinctively dominates my pastel color palette and symbolic narrative. I integrate 18th Century symbols of plants and flowers, 19th Century stained glass windows and nursery rhyme portraiture, the landscape (or dreamscape) and domestic emblems into the visual to reflect the mood of my present sentiment, impressions of my upbringing, thoughts of marriage and maternity, and a sensual relation to the natural world. I begin my work writing poetry and develop that impression into a symbolic piece. Though I base each piece upon the notion of this image, the material process of my fibers work always transforms and obscures the image into a piece that is aesthetically pleasing though quite enigmatic. Each fibers work is oriented in the development of first writing, then drawing, patternmaking, handwork, installation, and again concluding with writing. This framework becomes cryptic in the material manipulation: whether that be weaving a familiar structure, hand piecing a fabric puzzle, allowing an air-drying process to manipulate a paper wall-hanging, or installing a multilayer picture. While the process is elaborate, complex, and exhaustive, the veiling of a wistful narrative becomes my aesthetic motive.