Artist Statement
My work negotiates relationships: to self, to community, to place, to ideas. Using textile and fiber mediums as the core of my practice, I weave nets and create being-like objects which can be touched and entered. I use painting on fabric as a method for connecting to my bodily self, and as an arena for the exorcism of emotion and experience. When I use fabric or yarn or string, I feel connected to the lineage of skilled women in my family who passed down their knowledge and interest to me. My relationships to these women and to textile are conjoined, the foundation to both my selfhood and my artwork. Fiber and textile also present important metaphors relating to interconnection, tension, and protection. Woven threads intersect like individual lives, together creating a stable, interconnected structure. Tension, often addressed in my string and net works, is significant as a way to symbolize conflict and attachment. The process of wrapping yarn around something many times represents my urge to protect and enclose.
Often taking the form of large interactive sculptures and installations, my work aims to use its physicality to incite a response and dialogue in the viewer’s internal world. I create occasions for curiosity and reflection, where both I and the viewer can be supported in our questioning. I am interested in the structure of spaces, and use my work to understand and resolve my relationships to spaces and to existing within them, the work acting as a surrogate for my fear of and simultaneous desire for taking up space. My work confronts questions of my own identity and place within my communities, and also serves as visual metaphor to communicate my beliefs about the nature of relationships and selfhood in context of community structures.
