April 6-9
ghost ladder
202
Handwoven fabric - linen, cotton, silk, dye, 84" x 60"
photo by L Gnadinger
faerie trap (detail)
2021
Silk and dye, 56" x 36"
Artist Statement
I write poems in dream-like fragments and embrace textiles as containers of memories. Layering handmade weavings and lace with silk painting, my work speaks about surface, image, and object as an entangled whole. My research is in witchcraft and somatic traditions, with an emphasis on experimental poetry, mythology, and oral histories. These craft processes are forms of embodied drawing, an accumulation of intention. Textiles record their own making, inscribe the values of their makers and beholders. Textiles are texts. Stories change with every writer and with every reader. Meaning is hidden and revealed in every word as well as every absence. Textiles network the past and present.
Can we use a textile’s groundedness in time as a tool to look into the future? How can we turn and return from the past towards the future and to the present? The labyrinthine turning in and out and in again is echoed by meandering lines. These works’ sensuous fibers and eye-catching colors speak to the power of femme queer possibility, madness, dream, desire. This power is a revelatory force — soft, vulnerable, welcoming. These works are images to be read, or perhaps their meaning is to be divined, leaps of logic and intuition that piece together disparate parts into something, anything.