Salvage

This series uses various materials, including deconstructed screen-printed cotton textiles, arashi-painted cotton textiles, hand-spun and plied textile cording, cotton batting, commercial and handmade buckram, coiled cording.
Various dimensions, from 8”— 27” in height.
All pieces created in 2022

Every work in this "Salvage" exhibition began life as something else. I cut one old piece in half then made visibly new parts for each half to process the end of an important relationship. I sewed scraps from other work together to explore a new technique for making vessel forms.

I revised my process for creating fiber vessels. My original textile forms were self- supporting; they have no internal armature. Some new forms have more structure— not to keep them upright, they're still self-supporting—but so they'll hold the shape I want. The transparent, rusted pitcher with its visible wire armature looks both strong and vulnerable. A building-like vessel with "windows" has a similar contradiction. Its apertures seem as if they'd weaken the form, but instead they create anatomical strength and visual openness. A vessel with large fissures shows how brokenness can have great beauty.

From a pile of scraps, I designed pod-like forms. For several weeks, when things looked bleak, in my personal life and in the world outside, these pods were all I could create. After the 60th pod, I still didn't know anything about them, except that they kept me productive and made me happy during a dark time. Hung together in a coruscating group, they give me joy and remind me to persevere, even if I can't yet see the next step in a process.

I used a 50-year old quilt top made from my family's worn-out clothes to create material for new vessels and an abstract wall hanging. Putting that quilt top into service after so many decades of disuse gave me a new appreciation for my childhood on a farm where everything was mended as often as it needed to be and then transformed to a new use when it couldn't be mended yet again.