I am an artist creating multimedia tapestries through free-motion stitchwork. My practice combines writing, drawing, stitching, and dancing. I guide a fourteen-foot industrial longarm sewing machine over scrolls of fabric, embedding my textiles with bodily memory.
As a lifelong journaler, I approach each piece with elements of the form and intention of my personal writing practice. Text and textile are intimate kin: both are cumulative, and both come from the Latin verb texere: “to weave.” The way I create my work relates to weaving: moving via guidelines of warp and weft, integrating various spun fibers for their unique properties, storytelling, scaling between micro and macro, and keeping record of the passage of time.
My Lifeline series (a body of work yielding one monumental quilt per year of my life, and exhibited in 2022 in my solo exhibition, Lifeline, at Jonas Gallery in Colby, Kansas) relates to my lifelong journaling practice in its serial and archival nature. As its name suggests, Lifeline nods to my relationship with my creation process as a tool for emotional survival, and also to the importance of the mark of the line itself in my work. Line is the memory of my motion.
Within my textiles I am comforted to experience time as cyclical. Unlike in journaled text—where time accumulates chronologically in entries spanning many pages, and events from deeper past feel farther and farther away—in a textile, all the entries from an immense span of time can interact on a single surface. This accumulation and consolidation helps me face my own mortality. Each tiny stitch is a life cycle of connection: to stitch is to pierce, to draw together, to heal, to illuminate, and to always begin again.
The cyclical and continuous paradox of the stitch– something that pierces yet also strengthens toward healing–is deeply felt in my latest body of work, Everyday Saints. The show (debuted in my 2024 solo exhibition at The Art Base in Basalt, Colorado) explored themes of creation-destruction, loss & renewal, and personal sacrifice toward higher good. The museum-scale work for the show (twelve interconnected artworks in twenty-two components, including a 39-foot, nine-figure modular altarpiece entitled FEAR NOT), was formed over the most seismic years of my adult life. In the midst of major tectonic shifts, I distilled my own human emotions—fear, loss, grief, uncertainty— into shimmering lines of stitches. My path navigates frenetically yet also leaves behind a lasting illumination. Like abstract-expressionist forms of personal writing, my textiles are navigations.
Even within my choices of materials I feel a sense of awe that everything is interconnected. The process from start to finish takes years. I primarily use woven fabrics for my warp structures–the fabrics I stretch out and roll into scrolls. They all have stories. Rescued or repurposed, many come from mills that no longer exist. I often dye them with a multi-immersion overdye process– inspired by traditional glazing techniques in oil painting. I use a variety of fibers for dimensional embroidery: hand-spun wool, mohair, and silk-poly dupioni are my favorites, though I have others that I find and make. Whenever possible, I source new purchased fibers from human-scale fibersheds. In weaving together these beautiful offerings, I hope to leave behind artwork that can lend support to others.
