Common Chaos

Common chaos. Knots of life. Little irritants. Sometimes things don't go very smoothly or the way you planned. You gotta pause and work out the kinks. 

Layers Of Life

Layers of life are built of time, memory and experiences both significant and insignificant. Oftentimes it is those negligible things that spring to our consciousness time and again. Simple gestures are the found objects of life we hold onto for reasons we cannot explain. We are cocooned in these layers. We are bound by them. Our lives are like surprise balls with hidden treasures fossilized in its strata. Some are happy, some are sad, we share snippets with others as we meet and greet. Acquaintances grow into friendships. We mine their treasures as we share our own. We communicate and we connect. This is the sediment of life. It makes us vulnerable.

Shafts & Glands

An evolution of glandular shapes and biomorphic shafts, this family of Fiber Forms has been reproducing, and I've added several new ones to the website. 

I am thinking of the intricate web in/of our reproductive bodies and throughout the natural world. A tangle of coital life, I explore the animate and inanimate alike--whether ovaries, stamens, mammary glands or ancient fertility fetishes, modern sex toys and contraceptive devices. 

Through these forms I seek to meld the visual pleasures of knots and knobs with the endless labyrinth of time and sensual memory through repetitive twisting, wrapping and stitching. 

Read more about the process of creating these Fiber Forms.

A Lifeline

A year and a half ago, soon after I turned 40, I gifted myself a sabbatical to explore a new direction in my work. One of the first projects I tackled was to fabricate a sculpture out of an antique quilt top that I'd been holding onto for years with this purpose in mind. The slow evolution of this unfinished quilt has been a learning process for me with many stops and starts.

First, I created a simple drop pattern and proceeded to cut up the entire quilt. The drops were stitched together and stuffed inside-out so the hand-pieced, textured surface would be visible. Ironically the quilt lent me 42 drops--the age I will be turning in a few months.

In order to unify the forms and emphasize their texture without the distraction of a country craft palette each one was painted with black gesso. The gesso transformed the drops from a soft pillow form into a calcified cocoon. After painting, I sanded and stitched the pods to re-emphasize the lines and textures of the original quilted surface. The final surface was fused with a layer of wax lending a skin-like smoothness to these seemingly rough forms.

Through each step this work has pushed and pulled me along. The process was much more involved than I could have predicted at the outset. Nevertheless, I'm glad I keep pulling it back out to puzzle out each step of its transformation. It is a quilt no longer. The 42 drops have been bound tightly to a spine of sorts. I arranged them onto an old lead rope using the measurements of my own torso. For whatever this is, I call it a Lifeline.

A Dripple

The sun-faded pink door caught my eye, and I stopped to take a closer look. For some reason this color has begun to resonate with me in a way it has never done in the past. I find it creeping into my work, and I gravitate towards its supple allure when I'm out and about.

My eyes grazed the door for a closer look at the roughly painted facade, and I spotted a substantial drip on the bottom right hand corner. Drips and drops speak to me. The form of the drop and the action of a drip frozen in time is a theme I've been exploring recently. I took note that this particular drip resembled the shape of a breast with a nipple (a dripple perhaps?), and I clicked the shutter to capture its descent.