Throughout my career I have researched and used functional textiles as a lens through which to pose questions about the role of the handmade in the 21st century. I have employed embroidery, crochet, and, quilt structures, often manifested as drawings and paintings, to subvert and counter the banal nature of the stuff that surrounds us. Building up surfaces with the techniques associated with domestic survival in past generations, my work treads the line between the personal and the quotidian.
My work as an artist and professor operates within drawing, painting, and fiber, anchored by my engagement in acts of the hand. Via mark-making, thread, or length of yarn, these practices share line quality, structural attention, and complexity. My works show how these connections easily host metaphors for the relationships between states of progress/deterioration, the physical image, natural/manufactured. There are also clear differences between drawing, painting, and fiber in that fiber is often related to materiality, production, and traditionally feminine crafts, such as quilting and crochet, while the history of drawing and painting has deep ties to representation and issues related to the picture plane. My practice is, in part, a process of reconfiguring these distinctions into a system of making, while investigating ideas about time, labor, and the fragility of our natural world. I am hopefully involved in an endless line of small productive tasks that are the armature of communities in the face of larger, more powerful un-doings. Regardless of material, the work progresses (and is received) close to the pace of nature and akin to transposing the language of craft instructions to a shifted manifestation. The works ask for the consideration and gratitude given a first attempt blanket filled with mistakes but gifted and kept despite its flaws. Overt in its construction and economy, value is embedded through insistent work ethic and a corresponding interior experience.