An ecclectic selection in the visual, sculptural and decorative arts, this gallery is representative of my interets and travails while also showcasing my various craftskills. There is no statement of intent. I do not work as a professional artist. While I have be trained in floral and garden design (design vegetal) and constructed fibre arts (weaving and baskety), my explorations are simply witnesses to my presence and my curiosity. This is a testament to the fact that I have given myself permission to investigate the world in which I live and the materials that touch me.
I tend to work layers of texture, weaving and interlocking, negotiating and arranging. Assembling and interlacing. How do different tactile histories communicate with each other, symbiotically or imperially. What are the spaces they need, the spaces they take, how loudly do they walk with a big stick or snap back with spite? Always, the response of the hand that looks, tenderly invoking our human condition of labour. The eternal returns of the same and the trance that ensues when we are busy doing the same thing again. Like weaving or sewing or tying knots. But also clearing out the lint in a dryer, rubbing down domestic surfaces, chasing dust bunnies in the corners of solitary rooms. An ode to the domestic.
Repetition is a leitmotiv. Colour echoes are reminders. But mostly the thick descriptors expressed in materials whenever they can disturb contemporary surfaces –ever more screen like, glassy, flat, smoother, slicker, forgettable– these thick material descriptors console me. I discover that I can do less and less without them. I like mess and tangles, and things that go against the grain –they grow on me.
And now there is a desire for collecting and displaying, gathering and tending, all necessary to the creation of a relationship with traces…trace memories. Not in the head, but in the hand. I experiment, I beg, I engage and I often, more and more, just stuff things into my pockets, feeling somewhat like a thief or an eccentric old woman prepared even to collect wrinkles.
I clutch at the distresses of a material life. Dust, lint, selvedge, rough edges, earthy clay, clumped soil, petals and leaves and prickly stems growing longer. Tensile qualities and disagreeable surprises. Like the feel of a spot of dried sauce fallen accidentally on a silk blouse. Or a quilting needle pricking the skin of a finger. Then of course stones, pebbles, broken glass, splintered wood, cut hair, fake hair, yarns and threads, buttons and coins, an abandoned nest. Pollen when I can get it. Butterfly wings and fuzzy dead bees, husks of chestnuts, pits and seeds and samares.
I touch, but am being equally touched. They are things animate.
my Portfolio 