For over 35 years as a visual artist, I have been working within broad definitions of sculpture, drawing, and textiles in multiple dimensions. My work currently includes graphite and colored pencil drawings on mat board and architecturally scaled, site-responsive sculptural installations made with volumes of fine chromatic thread pulled taut through space. While this work is abstract, embedded within its formal and material languages are concerns of time, sequence, and causality, and a drive to speak about what is private, vulnerable, fragile, and perceptive of the human condition.
I understand my studio as a paced and daily conversation with place, manifesting and mirroring how I negotiate physicality, optics, and ideas. Each mark, color or line is simultaneously an action and a response, a moment, a thought, a leap of faith, and a record of that leap. Making my work is, for me, a form of travel – across a surface, within space and toward a luminous place. Works unfold at the pace of my step, as I pull thousands of lines across a pliant mat board or cast threads between walls while walking. I find context for my work within a long tradition of other “walking artists” - William Wordsworth, Helen Mirra, Rebecca Solnit, Virginia Woolf. Like these philosophers and writers, I walk to encourage a fluid state of perceptions, to contemplate place, and to affect change and adaptation as it informs moment-to-moment decisions in the making of my work.
As a young artist, I studied traditional indigo-dyeing, working with the Lamb Collection of West African Textiles at the Smithsonian Institute and traveling for conferences and exhibitions in Japan where I visited traditional indigo-dyeing workshops. As cloth is lifted out of the indigo dye pot, it is magical to watch how exposure to oxygen slowly changes the yellow-ish green color of the fermented liquid from the dye pot into deeper and deeper shades of blue in the cloth with each successive dip. It is as if air is creating the color. I realize now that these early experiments with indigo formed the underpinnings of my lifelong interest in color and color theory.
As a woman artist, I create work that challenges the long-held associations abstraction has with male artists. In my dynamic immersive work, abstraction is re-dressed from a feminist perspective in delicate materials with luminous color, repetition, and an ethereal quality of light. I create visual and spatial experiences that transcend language, slow time, and tap into something core within us, with belief that a kind of alchemy can exist in everyday life.
Searching for ways to visualize something we cannot see is a compelling way of working, especially in the context of our current lives that hold such uncertainty. It feels timely to work with ideas of the indeterminate, the immaterial, the mysterious, and the unknown. Color sits at the forefront of my work where it has the power to elicit visceral responses to the profound and disquieting present in which we all live.
