Artist's
Statement |
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am both a printmaker and a fiber artist. In both media, my images are,
in large part, inspired by my interest in the travel poetry of Elizabeth
Bishop and my own experiences of landscape in the diverse places I have
lived (Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Taiwan, and Italy). Bishop,
too, is interested in exploring geography—both physical navigations
between her homes in Boston, Nova Scotia, New York, Florida, and Rio de
Janeiro, and the emotional navigation of personal relationships: |
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“Is
it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”
(Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”)
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By recreating
landscapes on my own terms, in my own colors, in my most recent weavings
and prints, I develop a sense of home, wherever mine may be.
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Fibers |
I
create my fiber pieces on a table-loom and use double-weave, leno-weave
and plain weave structures. I always hand-dye or hand-paint my yarn and
sometimes use tie-dying or space-dying to achieve “accidental”
color effects. Usually, I begin my projects with a watercolor crayon drawing.
I then weave plain fabric with undyed yarn, remove the fabric from the
loom and paint this fabric with my initial design using thickened fiber-reactive
procion fabric dyes. I next set the dye, unweave the fabric and then re-weave
it on the loom in order to discover unexpected shifts in color. I sometimes
repeat this process to further abstract the image and enrich the color.
Clearly process is an important element of my studio work and therefore
I complete all aspects of it without assistants. |
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Prints |
In
my prints, I use a combination of printmaking and photo techniques—including
photolithography, Polaroid transfers and photocopy transfers. I frequently
work with photos that I take with my plastic Holga camera that is held
together with duct tape. It's a very low-tech medium-format camera. I
never know exactly what will appear on my negatives and that is why I
love it. I scan these original photographs into a computer, make minor
adjustments to brightness/contrast, and output them onto transparencies
for exposing plates that I hand-print onto archival paper. Most recently,
I was able to use the facilities at the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative,
thanks to a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago
Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council, a state
agency. |
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