I have always been led by a longing to materialize a vision with my own hands. Learning at a young age to sew my own clothes arose from a need even then to have full agency over how cloth covered the canvas of my body. When I later discovered the masterpieces of Bauhaus weavers Guntha Stölzl and Anni Albers, I was moved to study weaving in order to construct cloth itself. The MFA program I chose trained me in both textile design and fiber art, teaching me technical skills such as painting repeat designs in gouache while simultaneously encouraging my more esoteric inquiry into the interaction of woven textiles with light. When I later lost my job as a designer for the higher-end upholstery market due to domestic textile industry cutbacks, I was able to pivot and set up a fine art weaving studio with the purpose of pursuing my growing interest in the American woven coverlet genre. The bold geometric patterning of these nineteenth-century bed coverings evoked for me images of the wall hangings I had so admired from the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Over the next decade, I focused exclusively on one of these patterns, using its doublewoven tabby structure along with natural dyes to weave a two-layered canvas of color in dialogue with itself. In 2010 I also co-founded Flow gallery with 7 other women, exhibiting both there and in nearby Asheville, NC.
An inflection point occurred in 2014 when I collaborated with two gallery co-founders, Katie Vie and Lisa Mandle, on a show we called “Synesthesia: Ineffable Pairings of Scent and Cloth”. Katie’s collection of seven proprietary aromatherapy scents inspired our conception of seven panels of fabric which I then wove, using some of the engineered yarns and chemical burnout techniques from my graduate thesis work. This reprisal, along with the haptic approach we took to making cloth for this show, drew me away from the time-consuming, technical execution of the wall hangings towards a 4-year examination of my original interest in light and fabric. Employing photography, weaving and numerous post-production processes, the work from this time probes the physical space of the body and the spirit that inhabits it. As my approach to making work became increasingly intuitive however, the technical aspects of weaving began to feel more and more like a barrier to my creativity. I also realized that I missed color, an element I had largely sacrificed in my pursuit of textile translucency. Here the “Synesthesia” show again proved itself to be momentous; during its planning sessions, I discovered my grapheme-color synesthesia, solving a lifelong mystery as to why I perceive text through the lens of color. This profound realization reprioritized color as my creative sine qua none, and rather than adding color back into my weaving, I disposed of the loom altogether and turned instead to working directly with pigment on paper. My current body of work, Text-iles, uses my own letter/color coding system to plot text into a geometric composition. I have, in a sense, become the loom, still manipulating color on pressed fiber by way of my own semiotics, much as a textile is built line by woven line through translation of the symbolic notation for threading and treadling. I find that I have a lot to say and that speaking in this new language of abstracted color feels liberating and exciting.