Artist Statement

With found textiles and traditional quilting techniques, I tell stories from my lived experience and share my observations of the natural world around my homeplace in central Virginia.

Textiles are loaded with cultural and personal meaning. I intentionally repurpose household textiles and clothes for several reasons:  1) The textile industry is incredibly labor and resource intensive, yet textiles are treated like a disposable material. Textiles are abundant! There is no need for me to purchase new fabrics.   2) I have several ‘working quilts’ made by my great grandmother with old clothes from her household. Family members have told me stories of sleeping under these quilts as children and feeling the comfort and weight of multiple quilts on their little bodies. This story touches me, and I wish to connect with family history in my own way and explore the somatic possibilities of textile art. 3) Used textiles embody their own history through signs of wear and tear. They’ve touched bodies and inhabited personal spaces. I don’t need to know the exact story behind a bed sheet I found at the thrift store to appreciate it’s ‘potency.’ When I incorporate that material into my work, the story continues.

Quilting also has a broad history and as many contradictory connotations as textiles, particularly the tension between craft and fine art. For me, sewing is technologically simple and allows me to work with my hands directly on the material. My visual tools are ‘drawn’ stitch lines, surface texture, and geometric imagery. Despite the physicality of the objects I make, I cannot deny the influence of my education as a painter.

I studied observational painting as an undergraduate, which taught me a new way of ‘seeing’ the visible world. I transitioned away from painting and drawing when I realized that I had a need to work more directly with my hands and have a more intimate relationship with the materials of art making – I began cutting, manipulating, and sewing paper. These early objects seemed to fall somewhere between drawing and sculpture. They were physical, and also pictorial.

For the last three years, I’ve almost exclusively made quilts that combine traditional patterns with a scrappy asymmetry: initially suggesting landscapes and more recently illustrating or symbolizing natural phenomena. This imagery is influenced by my daily life and relationships. My partner is a farmer, and together we spend a lot of time observing and experiencing the changing landscape from season to season. Through my day jobs, I am exposed to herbalism, bodywork, and pre & perinatal psychology. These have begun to influence my visual vocabulary and the direction of my art practice. Going forward I intend to make both functional and non-functional quilts and to continue exploring traditional quilt patterns alongside abstract plant and animal symbolism as metaphors for lived human experience.