Artist Statement

Inspired by Gees Bend quilts, Bauhaus design, along with protest banners and an inherited,  female, make-do-and-mend ethos, I make tapestries, wearable drapes, and small scale sculptures from used clothes and a variety of found materials. The materials still bear traces of their former lives but are transformed, recombined, and redeployed. The combinations of elements that occur are playfully rebellious, each a whole assembled from disparate parts. Rather than building from a planned design, I gather and respond intuitively to existing, discarded fragments and ad hoc off-cuts so that each work is the collision of parts that coalesce in the moment.

Underlying my work are themes of provisionality and precarity. My drapes are pieced together from cast-off, often moth-eaten, cashmere sweaters. Organic in contour and process, they are meditations on luxury, sensuality, visibility, utility, aging, and survival.

Similarly, my recent series, As Yet Untitled. But Still Dancing…, is an ongoing collection of colorful tapestries pieced together and hand stitched from various found textiles, each featuring a looping black line “drawing” in cashmere. The black swirls are based on fast, freewheeling, dance-like gestures in space that I initially painted and cut from their grounds. 

Along with my wall-hangings and drapes, I construct unstable, tabletop monuments and edifices from cut up oil pastel and watercolor resist drawings inspired by weaving and textile design. The highly patterned surfaces clash and shiver. Taken together my work is informed by the language of abstraction, gesturing toward its history while rooted in democratizing DIY, craft, and female labor practices.