I’m a third generation textile artist. My mother was involved in the arts council from a young age and so I grew up with raku fire pits in the back yard and cyanotype workshops. I was exposed to a wide array of materials from a young age. My mother was a Navajo tapestry weaver and her mother was a rag rug weaver on a four harness loom. Later an 8 harness loom. She was also a quilter and painter. So I grew up around a lot of love of textiles.
So later as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, with a gentle push from my mother, I studied textiles and had the incredible opportunity of working for Asiatica. A company that makes clothing out of deconstructed Kimono fabrics. I really fell in love with silk textiles then.
The interesting thing about Japanese Kimono fabric is the strip construction of the garment. All of the fabrics are 12 inches wide and back when I started work at Asiatica, the silk lining fabrics were too thin for them to use. I love the translucent quality of silks and I could layer two fabrics and the shapes would shadow through. I just was fascinated with the vibration of the cloth.
In about 2010 I got to go to a private Kimono sale in Las Vegas where there were both Kimono and Obi for sale. Amd with Obi there’s quite often double weave where one side is the reverse of the other. The Obi is the waist belt and they are just some of the most beautiful textiles in the world.
This originally was an entire Kimono pf single stripe. I think I began a love affair with stripes several years ago and I start with busting up the lines and piecing them back together to create the fractured shape. Sometimes these pieces can linger in my studio for years before the go into an actual piece. All of the work is intuitively pieced and in conversation with itself and me. I often leave the space then come back to see how the work is moving. I would say that in the last few years the work has gotten a lot more congested in their piecing and the stacking of the shapes. For the last few years I’ve been thinking about balance and imbalance in the world and trying to find peace with that.
