Haven’t we all wrapped ourselves in fabrics for comfort or protection, identity or style?  Coveted them, tossed them in the trash, even judged others by their use of them? Who hasn’t sensed past voices when handling faded vintage pieces? Yet, what’s more immediate and compelling than the energy of freshly hand dyed colors?

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I work in textiles because I’m drawn to the unique voice of each fabric.  They’re ubiquitous but intriguing, almost always pliable, often strong, other times delicate, occasionally both.  They’re usually willing to contort themselves into practically any form or shade I need, while still imparting that sense of past lives mixed with a saturation of new, colorful energy.

 

Brilliant, freshly hand dyed sheer silks allow me to pile layer on layer to gain a glorious changeable translucency, then to gently hold them in place with delicate metallic stitches.  Sturdy or even flimsy vintage fabrics, heavy with past lives, will cooperate with highly-controlled piecing, followed by lines of meditative concentric stitching that secures their role within a piece.

 

Because we’re each so intimately familiar with textiles, they can serve as personal lenses on public stories.  I can thread a vintage fabric’s complex voice into a piece reverberating with fresh color and metallics in order to give context to a contemporary story that may be beautiful or violent – or even both. 

 

In fact, historically and today, so often it is the energy escaping in the seconds between vibrant beauty and violent devastation, as well as the resilience of that beauty as it emerges from punishing violation and darkness, that confronts us all while captivating me. 

 

Working in textiles allows me to capture that energy and resilience.  Each piece of fabric is imbued with its own complex history, however brief or long.  Every fabric, and, by extension each of my completed pieces, carries with it the reverberating memories of its own inspiration and creation, memories that are threaded together so that we might wrap ourselves in them today.