Artist Statement
Born of a sense of playfulness, my work engages with craft as a language, family histories, the passage of time, and daily domestic tasks. My practice is like compost, cycling the old with the new to create fertile territory.
Ancient dyers had a popular saying that any weed can be a dye. I see in this phrase a delightful potentiality, a refreshing shift in perspective away from uselessness and undesireability towards a creative optimism.
This is why I am drawn to quilts and collage, as both are strategies of infinite possibility and regeneration. Quilts interest me for their connection to thrift, in many ways the antithesis of endless consumption.
My paper quilts rearrange stains into order. I think of stains in relation to garments and caring for laundry, a context where such marks are undesirable or even shameful – particularly when an item has sentimental value like a family heirloom. I’m interested in this unglamorous, gendered and underappreciated labor for its importance in shifting to a more sustainable mode of living.
