Attachments is comprised of objects and materials that trigger childhood memories of things collected or passed down from family that hold affection and bind us together. The things we can’t part with become a part of us.
The color pink has associations of tenderness and femininity. This box contains objects I had emotional attachments to that trigged childhood memories of longing, desire and loss. Some of the objects were collected or passed down from family and some were parts of pieces from other work I made that became a source for further investigation. Contents: small twined objects out of waxed linen from Untouched-wrapped driftwood sticks with resist dyed string-bones-small baby figurines wrapped with hog gut-shredded paper that is stitched together and waxed-small twined figures-mother's recipes and box-my teenage diary-spools of silk thread-wrapped seed pods of resist dyed string and hog gut-women's leather gloves- my great grandmother's hair iron-my hair sitting on an an aunt's handkerchief-tiny pink seashells-small pink felted tongues-felted over wooden objects-sticks painted with gesso and rubbed with graphite
Remedies for healing and repair are kept in a medicine cabinet. The remedies in Archive connect to childhood memories. These strange salves of my past, the blanket, bandage, cards, clothespins, plaster cast of my teeth, rusted toy wheels and baby shoes are reminders of the bruised childhood I once endured. The sticks are pacifiers. The small pink felted covering on the wooden spool is an association I have to biting my nails and sucking my thumb. A reminder that the color pink has associations of nurturing and wool has warmth and protection.
The worn quality of the clothespins suggested their uselessness but they are repurposed and valued for their wear and tear. I am attracted to their aged markings that suggest they we're once loved.
Remnant is composed from men’s button-down shirts I collected from thrift stores. Their previous use added to the feeling of memory and meaning of wearing hand-me-down clothes. I grew up the middle child of four brothers. The time I spent cutting out the buttonhole plackets, dyeing and then stitching them became a mindful and meditative act.
Buttonhole plackets separated from their shirts act as lines of text and the buttonholes as words. Pieced together they read as textile. Swaddling is stitched together with pink thread, embedded with wool and makes a blanket to convey a sense of caring and warmth.
An understanding of the work comes through your senses. Form is given to abstracted figures or surrogates in the guise of empty vessels. The visual fragility of the cloth in my work contributes to associations of membrane, veneer and permeable skin, sometimes bruised and vulnerable, sometimes misshapen and marked upon. Like skin, cloth holds the wear and tear of time through stretching, abrasion, and sagging. I see my work as abstracted figures, whether as flat planes or as sculpture. They are constructed as emotional surrogates; empty vessels, thin skinned, splayed out, hung up, tattooed.
The visual fragility in the cloth contributes to the associations of skin as membrane, bruised, worn, and vulnerable. It evokes pathos and empathy. Like skin, cloth is absorptive and can be pricked with needle and stitched with thread. I bring to the surface what stalks beneath the veneer; stresses that seep through our subconscious, like seeping though our skin, are held within the body and manifested as disease or discomfort. I choose the colors of pink and purple paired with wax and thread to show the physicality and emotionality of the loss and discomfort we experience as we go through life. Emotional layers are build up, like the building up of sediment, through force and pressure until an eruption occurs and becomes manifest on the surface.
This "body" bag was my first foray into the idea of bag as empty vessel or repository for life's experiences. The division of the markings from the top of the bag was to create the idea of head and torso, an abstracted figure. I applied beeswax as a material to create the idea of skin in its translucency and permeability.
The repetition of mark making on cloth, delicate and small openings twined in waxed linen, weavings splayed like animal hides, these works represent the conscious body.
The meaning in these works comes from the deliberative and rhythmic acts coupled together with the interaction of materials. It is through these conscious acts of making that create a sense of intimacy within the work.
The diptych arranged close together and framed by wood created an association of looking through windows, looking out onto a field. The small ovals are like water drops on glass that magnify what lies underneath. Hurricane Katrina and the flooded rooms leaving behind water marks where residue was captured on the wall are also associations.
Small ovals hold your attention as place markers for contemplation-meditation. The slightly raised embroidered thread has associations of scar, tattoo, branding or stigmata.
The small ovals represent intimacy, a place to rest your eyes, a place to gather your breath, a place of looking deeper into the surface, or magnifying what lies underneath, discovering what lies just beneath the chaotic tangle of lines, the jumbled mess of our thoughts.
Skin has memory and is imprinted with lines slowly over time. These meandering lines tell stories of our desires and longings. The lines, slits, and stitched marks of this skin-like cloth reflect our life's journey.
Scraped, torn and distressed, Rend 2 amplifies the effects of time. Rend 2 was created during Hurricane Katrina and the media captured the devastating effects of the storm as the water receded. What remained in the aftermath of the storm was debris covered with muck.
The structure and metaphor of the human spine conjures up images of strength and responsibility, but the small openings convey a sense of vulnerability.
Each box with twined form represents the orifices of our bodies and are placed on the wall in relation to their positions within the body. The beeswax encases each box as a protective skin. The small, delicate, circular openings of the twined forms present a sense of innocence. When we are born we are unmarked by life's circumstances.
The mutability of sticks as both object and subject transcend their ordinariness. These sticks function as talismans, souvenirs, props, relics, surrogates and artifacts. Gathering the sticks became a ritualistic act. The beach from where they were gathered became a bone yard. The emotional attachments they chronicle are of tenderness, separation and loss. They are reminders of our mortality and through their transformation in my work they are raised from the dead.
These pink felted sticks became amputated limbs of all the soldiers and civilians alike, who have recently been maimed in current wars from around the world. By felting over the sticks with pink wool, my intention was to create an act of nurturing, a salve for healing the wounds of so many maimed by war.
The use of the boxes as containers symbolizes the idea of transport to the after life. The box as open casket. Their vertical positioning on the wall references the human body with the intention of confronting death and the afterlife. The sticks were gathered from the beach and rescued into this work thereby redeeming their status as dead wood. Each group of sticks was wrapped with strips of dyed cloth, paper, ribbon and string. Each had embedded between the layers small objects or amulets such as buttons, letters, and linen handkerchiefs. These wrapped sticks took on the uncanny appearances of misaligned bodies of hands and feet.
Through my attention and care these sticks were transformed into a body. Dyeing and carefully wrapping the drift wood sticks in Indigo and waxed linen elevated and gave value to their status. Wrapping and dyeing was a transformative and ceremonial act.
The bound sticks in Crone reference an old woman's body as well as a sense of loss. Each stick was chosen for its particular bend or crook. The protruding stick feet are painted purple in reference to the body shutting down, no longer able for oxygen to circulate. The hog gut is membrane, thin and shear much like skin as we age.. The cavity of the box is filled with dark red beeswax, the blood connection we have to each other as well as a reference to embalming fluid. Crone is a reminder we all eventually become just bones.
I use sticks symbolically as memento mori, artifact, talisman, relic, amulet and surrogate. Sticks conjure up emotional attachments to loss and suffering. I purposefully choose sticks that have particular articulated form. In Reoccurring Affections 1 & 2, the painted sticks function as text, undecipherable. The sewn grid and the folding of the paper hold connotations of maps.
This photo shows the process of how the paper was created for Reoccurring Affections 1 & 2. Kozo paper was pulled as single sheets and then layered together like shingles on a roof. The kozo picked up fugitive dye from the weaving as well as the texture of the surface. When the kozo was dry it was lifted off the weaving as a singular sheet of paper.
Journalists have the difficult task of sifting through the rubble of news and organizing shards of information into a cohesive story. Celebrity news has hijacked the Media. In contrast to this trivialization of what is news worthy, this exhibit tells the stories of real marginalized people living in Los Angeles. Angelenos who are homeless, disabled, elderly, etc. have lived quietly, but courageously, facing their daily struggles and most often do not warrant headline news or recognition. People, whose stories tell of lives of displacement, addiction, mental illness, loneliness, and poverty are poignantly told using the photographic process of cyanotype on multi-layered fabric panels.
cyanotype prints on cotton muslin, some are over-dyed in tea
Each cloth panel is created by collaging together negative images exposed on a light box.
John was a man I met in the McArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Shortly after the exhibit of Living in the Margins, John was killed by being set on fire. His story was told in the LA Times, a story of John's life on and off the streets. We all have a past and cannot assume to know a person by their present circumstances. John was sweet, approachable, and had the brightest blue eyes.
The reinvention and repurposing of cloth from discarded pattern books is a metaphor for bringing new life to what was to be tossed away.
The processes of over-dyeing in both Re Bloom and Hexagon Blues brought unity to the fabrics. Pink was chosen for Re Bloom because it signifies growth and femininity. Surface depth is created by the layers of screen-printing and stencils with pigments and discharge paste.
I’ve been a collector of security envelopes and find myself engaging in the design possibilities of abstracting the small patterns found on the inside of the envelopes by playing around with scale and shape via photoshop. I’m engaged with the possibility of creating beauty from what is typically trash. I prepare my screens with these designs and mix inks not knowing in advance what the outcome is going to be but trusting in the possibilities, the process and myself enough to have confidence that all of the time and effort will combine into some idea of Constructed Harmony.
· Starting with the most mundane of fabrics, unbleached muslin, the muslin is transformed first through dyeing and in these panels there are subtle gradations from light to dark.
· I screen print on both sides of the cloth to create layers of depth.
· I then paint on a mixture of bees wax and paraffin that transforms the cloth even more by making it translucent and stiff. It becomes almost paper-like.
· If properly back-lit they are transformed into looking like stained glass.
· all of this is labor intensive but as I say, each artist has his or her own madness.
· I wanted the panels to have more dimensional presence so I accordion folded each into a grid and burnished the edges leaving the trace of the grid.
· The panels undulate slightly from the wall, unfolded like a map. This in turn led to the white embroidered“X” that sits on the very top of the surface. Seducing you to linger a little longer.
Constructed Harmony is a total of 4 dyed and printed cloth panels, waxed, embroidered, folded horizontally
Starting with the most mundane of fabrics, unbleached muslin, the muslin is transformed first through dyeing, then screen printed on both sides of the cloth to create layers of depth. Wax was added to created translucency and body.
before embroidered or folded
before embroidered or folded
before embroidered or folded
before embroidered or folded
manipulating panel by folding it to stand up vertically
screen printed on cotton, appliquéd, stitched together
The city is a manufactured landscape, an urban environment. During a walk through my neighborhood, I encountered several redwood trees, hundreds of miles away from their natural habitat. Drawn to the rugged surface of the trees, which was a counter point to all of the concrete and asphalt surroundings, Naughty Knotty, is a tree manufactured out of a single photographic image taken of a section of bark. The multi-shingled image of the bark echoes the experience one would have walking amongst a grove of redwood trees. Because of the scale you cannot see the forest through the trees. What you can experience is the tactile quality and the physical presence of the bark of the tree.
In Naughty Knotty, the use of cloth transforms our notions of bark as hard and tough. The soft, pliable and lightweight qualities of the cloth express an idea of bark and tree as a gracefully draped feminine sheath. The formidable scale and girth of Naughty Knotty and the bold image of bark paired with the suppleness of cloth contradicts our perceptions of what a tree is supposed to be.
view of single cotton print
I love creating patterns on cloth with Shibori. Shibori is a controlled resist dye method developed in Japan. Several types of dye classes are utilized corresponding to the type of fiber content in each cloth. Indigo is a natural blue vat dye and various depths of blue can be achieved depending on the strength of the vat and the number of dips into the vat. Acid dyes work on the protein fibers of wool and silk and also nylon.
the grey mood was created by over-dyeing with black to capture the fog in the early morning on Deer Isle
I love the process of creating patterned surfaces by building up multiple layers through screen printing. I find joy, excitement and the anticipation of the outcome playing with color combinations. I like to use the same screens in different combinations with colors of ink to change the mood.
I made a series of short videos on my printing process. You can find the steps on my YouTube channel.
One Christmas holiday I printed a set of napkins for each family member and friends. I cut and sewed mitered corners on each one. That was a labor of love.
I'm not using a registration system but my sense of layout and eyeballing the placement, this takes experience
