Advanced Fiber Studio (Highlights)
I primarily use traditional craft techniques - embroidery, wool felt, weaving, appliqué, crochet, and dye work - as well as occasionally painting or writing. I’m interested in plastic expression, experiences in tactility, and hedonistic material exploration, as well as working with labor-intensive processes and self-imposed limitations. Experimentation and chance factor hugely in my process, as do investigations into abstraction and the construction of images.
For example, in a three months during 2008 I made a 6x6” embroidery each day, exploring the methods and materials of needlework as a pre-determined system. In another piece titled, Awareness Project, the viewer was asked to interrogate their personal politics through identifying with a selection of color-coded craft store ribbons. In another project, I rolled five pounds of merino wool into various worms and nubs, that were then dyed using natural materials and arranged in a grotesque pile. In the ongoing series Degradation System, I use iron and copper compounds in traditional and chance-based dye processes as a mark-making device on various fibers, painstakingly documenting and labeling each test.
In my current work, I’ve returned to embroidery as drawing I use the stitched line to ply the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, relief and the flat image, as well as to interrogate the medium’s relationship to the history of painting.