Statement
I rely on handcraft techniques that I learned from my grandmother for guidance as I manipulate materials not associated with those crafts. I have experienced moments of beautiful camaraderie between women while learning skills that are associated with femininity, like knitting, sewing, or “fixing” hair. Historically, handcrafts offered an important space for female expression. At the same time, I consider the intricacies of crafts like quilting and smocking as evidence of the intense confining of women’s intelligence to the home. By applying traditional handcraft techniques to unexpected materials, like clay, paper, and plastic, I create distance and tension between certain rigid ideas of women.
My work reveals an obsession with texture and handwork, for me the similarity of these two things is time. I produce textures that are invisible to quick glances. Like the handwork techniques which inspired them, my surfaces reward those who slow down to get a closer look. In a culture defined by efficiency and productivity, handcraft techniques can feel like an act of subversion.
My highly textured surfaces, though orderly in one sense, contain enough variability to implicate the slow work of hands as opposed to machines. These multi-layered, dimensional surfaces resist a flattening or simplification of complex experiences; instead, they offer a space with physical depth for more complicated considerations.
Thoughts related to my work using found materials
I think of creativity as the most renewable resource– in bleak spaces it can generate hope for solutions that have not yet been discovered. While hope is a sensation that leans towards the future, I also consider my studio practice a collaboration with past generations. I rely on the work of craftspeople, those who came before me and dedicated themselves to learning about a particular material, for guidance in my studio. I have learned processes for manipulating many mediums associated with craft traditions: fibers, metals, wood, and most extensively ceramics.
How to make “something out of nothing” and “haste makes waste” are two principles that craftspeople have preserved that have direct application to inspiring more sustainable practices and futures. I want my work to inspire hope in the way that I create something new and unexpected with mundane and discarded objects. By relying on handcraft techniques like smocking and weaving, my work also suggests the importance of remembering the solutions that have already been discovered, but might have been forgotten.