The Story
I explore ideas of cloth and memory by leaving silk in lakes, rivers, and bogs of Minnesota. However, I didn’t begin my career with the intention of working as a textile/fiber artist; I began as an artist who worked with earth, plants, and land. I began my artistic work with land art and landscape architecture. My work centered on conversations with ideas of a place (site specific constructions), and work that enfolded materials such as dirt, wood, clay, and, importantly, plants as gardens, crops, or wild habitat. I sought to explore and describe concepts of wilderness and waterways – as well as ideas of toxicity inflected on the earth, mothering and nurturing, as well as growth and caretaking more broadly.
However, in 2011, I began exhibiting work inspired by author Patricia Eakins’s story “The Hungry Girls.” These installations profoundly changed the direction and materials of my work. “The Hungry Girls” is a fable of the grotesque: in their insatiable hunger, giantesses consume everything in sight, including dirt (a strong connection for me), and once pregnant, the daughters they carry are born by eating their way out of the mother’s bellies. In the story the giantesses fight over a single nightgown, and this garment became the focus of my work. Significantly, this is when I fell in love with working with fiber. I made a series of nine 10’ tall dresses to represent the Hungry Girls, rendered from raw Navajo Churro fleeces nuno-felted into cloth. I manipulated each giant dress with markings of dirt, rips, cuts, and exaggerated hand stitching, which attempts to repair the gashes. I wanted the fabrication of these dresses to bear the description of the women’s wild and insatiable condition. For one dress, I followed an impulse to cut the dress in half vertically and suspended the two halves with just a small slit of space between them. The effect was a startling allusion to childbirth and motherhood. I first heard the story of “The Hungry Girls” when I was pregnant with my first child. What stayed with me was the fact that, pregnancy, that is, the gestation of new life is primal and biological, durational and utterly uncontrollable.
Markings on cloth to describe conditions remain an important gesture in my work. I have learned I can let go total control of my artistic process and engage the natural world to participate in a new way: I have come to think of the earth, and specifically the rivers and watersheds of Minnesota, as my collaborators. In this collaboration, like motherhood, I must embrace fully the primal, biological, durational, and uncontrollable aspects of making and, instead, engage instinct.
I take cloth into the landscape, creating works from silk that has been stained with waterway sediments. For my textile abstractions, I leave silk to soak (for weeks, months, or years) in the waters, mud, and sediments of rivers, lakes, and bogs throughout Minnesota. Sediments carried in the waters of these locations dye the silk and imbue the cloth with the places themselves. After I retrieve the silk, I create cut and layered works, often threadbare with remnants of mud and wrinkles, joined with wax to preserve and transform the silk into skin-like, large-scale, cloth assemblages and deconstructions. I use Iron, both in its powdered form and found as a natural component within waterway sediments and mud. Combining this iron with natural leaf and bark tannins creates contrasting light and dark colors on silk.
As an abstractionist, my hope is that the organic shapes, earth colors, stains, and textures of these works hold the memory of these wild places as well as the movement and durational condition of water and time. I have sought to represent the forms of diatoms and other lake and wet-land microscopic organisms. I have sought to represent the forms of the land itself layered with time, of the waterways, of decay and regeneration through abstract shapes, holes, layering and hand stitching. These large installations inhabit space like living beings, powerful as they represent the strength and life of these amazing places while also revealing a sense of loss and fragility, thin as paper and full of holes.
In my work’s interests in time, water, birth, history, dirt, and life-cycles, the markings, colors, textures, and deteriorations made by water on the cloth that I soak in Minnesota watersheds not only intend to make visible the wonder of life in these wild places, but also seek to render visible ways in which our earth has and continues to be damaged by destructive human actions. Ultimately, I hope for my work to tell part of the complex story of these wet-lands that hold much of the biodiversity remaining on earth. Protecting and preserving this biodiversity is an essential component to facing climate change and keeping earth hospitable to life.