I’ve had a long preoccupation with spiders. I was very scared of them as a child, but as an adult, I enjoy observing them in action. I’m also interested in the spider as a symbol. Spider stories are found in many traditions, and are often associated with women and, unsurprisingly, textile craft. It is an appropriate symbol for me right now, as I am preoccupied with my own personal history related to textiles - a general ‘inheritance’ for any woman attracted to weaving/sewing/fiber arts and a specific relationship to the work of women in my own family. But I don’t want to make work about that.

I’m more interested in this one story that keeps coming back to me, an anecdote from Annie Dillard: While at Tinker Creek, she observed a bird, a jay or something, with ruffled feathers, some tail feathers missing…it looked like it just narrowly escaped some predator or mishap. “Life catches you by the tail,” she said. If a bird or insect or small mammal survives at all, it survives with scars and missing limbs.

I have often seen seven-legged spiders around the farm. They’ve narrowly escaped some bird or had to extract themselves from a landslide of pebbles or some catastrophe. Whenever I see them, I think of Dillard’s observation that “Life catches you by the tail,” and it reminds me that we all bear the marks of living.

(Above) This is a series of ongoing explorations of spiders and spider webs. Salvaged fabric scraps, hand-pieced & quilted, stretched on a bamboo embroidery hoop, 2018.