ARTIST STATEMENT
The preciousness of the hand-embroidered and drawn objects I make yield an unexpectedly symbiotic relationship with elements of technology. These works are coupled with mass-produced ephemera, architectural design, and social networking to create a new context for embroidery in today’s ready-made society.
This dialogue between the slowness of the hand-made and the immediacy of modern technological advances has been realized in four separate bodies of work: the Dream Home Sweet Home series, the Daily Journaling Project and Free Form series, and the Be Nice. project.
Dream Home Sweet Home
The rigidity of an architectural floor plan is transformed into a sewn image, using color and pattern to envision a visual dynamic reflective of that specific domestic environment. Additional plans are rendered in the language of embroidery with colored pencil, referencing the analog versions of both home design and embroidery templates. These various “dream homes” are planned and rendered again and again in different incarnations, vestiges of hope and wanting, each better than the last.
Free Form and Daily Journaling Project
Passing fiber through the lens of painting births forms that invigorate the familiar understandings of both mediums. Here the storytelling ability of the tapestry is appropriated and re-imagined to create images that translate quotidian events into abstracted compositions.
Be Nice. project
Twitter, Facebook, blogging, brochures and postcards are paired with the matriarchal sampler to draw a response which fluctuates between sincerity and cynicism. The objects’ positive yet mildly proselytizing and instructive tone bring a range of reactions to the Be Nice. project, indicating individual relationships with our society: defensive, suspicious, receptive, symbiotic, and so on. While irony and subversion come standard in contemporary imagery and communication, here sincerity is subversive.