My desire to create tangible material records of transient interactions drives my artistic practice.
In some drawings, I mix ceramic slip and fabric dye and pour it on torn newsprint. As the mixture deposits its pigment and shrinks, the paper responds by absorbing and buckling. Upon evaporating the clay flakes off, and I carefully sew it into place or collect it to install alongside the piece. I slice through drafting film and weave in the newsprint fragments, and add geometric shapes to counteract the clay spillage. These drawings have a decidedly aerial perspective. My mother worked at a satellite imagery lab for the US Geological Survey during the first 25 years of my life. When I was high school, I saw aerial images of Kuwaiti oil derricks on fire during the first Iraq war. 17 years later, I used the process described above to produce an uncanny remaking of the Kuwait images, which I rediscovered only after completing the drawing. I had subconsciously archived these photographs in my teen mind, and unintentionally conjured them through my adult hand.
These interactions are set into motion by me, but generate their own momentum and decide their own fate.
Choreographer Lily Skove and I wanted to capture water’s attraction to itself. I combined water with various colors of acrylic paint in containers while she set up the video camera. We put the paper on a slight incline. In one 13-minute take, I poured each color in response to our shared perception—sometimes spoken, often unspoken—of what the composition needed. “Red, brown…pause…purple, blue, purple…pause…y-e-l-l-o-w…” At first the water forged its own paths, the leading edge rushing into the paper’s expanse. Later, it would course into the already established pathways despite our desire for new ones. Even a full container of black could not force the rivers to jump their banks.
Often I start with an idea of what I want to document, but the end result is much different than I expect.
Nearly every birth, death, illness and major life transition at St. Andrew Lutheran Church is marked with a quilt or prayer shawl. Thousands are made and given to congregation members and community organizations. They go all over the world. I imagined a thread tied to each of these items, and the resulting net it would create. My idea was to make that fabric of care visible to St. Andrew. Both a 1943 article by anthropologist Margaret Mead and the Jewish tradition of building sukkahs (temporary tent-like structures) inspired this idea. During my one-week residency, I interviewed quilting and crochet groups, and led a workshop on taking portraits of people with fabric items they’ve received. Congregation members of all ages visited and photographed each other in their homes; I am still collecting these images. We also made a one-day installation using the theme of tents. It needed to be very temporary and inexpensive, so we draped quilt faces in the lobby space and displayed paper-sized quilts made during a workshop with the preschool children. I continue to work on book of their photographs, and am thinking about another installation of quilt faces to be shown in galleries. However, the biggest and most meaningful surprise has been that they have embraced the theme “A Fabric of Care” as part of how they talk about their community. They have adopted this idea and made it their own.
Through my work, I am asking, “Can you see what I see?”
