Balancing Act comes out of a year of trying to find my way through a world that feels
increasingly unstable. Each day carries the weight of political noise, unease, and
uncertainty, and the studio is the place where I try to slow down enough to listen. The
work is not about being steady. It is about looking for steadiness inside conditions that
keep shifting.
I work with vintage kimono and obi textiles, contemporary silks, and other fabrics
collected over many years through travel, exploration, and gifts from people who
understood how deeply I value cloth. My connection to Japanese textiles began when I
was young, working at Asiatica in Kansas City (www.asiaticakc.com). That early
experience taught me to recognize the labor, skill, and cultural history held in these
materials, and I approach them with respect for the original makers. When I cut and
reconfigure the cloth, I am following the grain, the tension, and the history inside the
textile.
This year I have been thinking about desire paths, cairns and wayfinding. They are the
quiet systems people use to orient themselves when the official routes fail. These
pieces hold that search. They carry the tension of disorientation and the instinct to keep
going, to make a path where none is offered.
In the studio, the compositions come together through fragments that lean and settle
and test their place. Many of the pieces feel as if they are still shifting. That movement
reflects the time in which they are being made. Many artists I know, myself included, are
struggling to make work under the weight of this moment.
Delicate slivers and weighted blocks of silver obi, the long sash worn with kimono,
appear throughout the exhibition as a deliberate act of hope. The silver catches light
and redirects it. It marks a sense of optimism, the possibility of a way forward.
A few of the works in this exhibition are from my earlier series Walking in Traffic. They
are included here because they mark the moment when trust entered my practice in a
deeper way. That series was about learning to move through uncertainty. Balancing Act
holds that trust in the present and stays open to the possibility of new forms, new
balance, and new ways forward.
