I make homebodies— amorphous collections of knots and woven moments of toilet paper and worn denim and clothes line and twine— that limply sway from whiffs of wind and passing bodies. These homebodies, embodiments of disjointed pasts, act as the foundation for muddled recollections to be revealed, for snot, knot memory moments to come together. Through the laborious repetitive acts of tying, I think through how loss and fragmented traumatic memory sit in the body and in my hands.
I started working in fiber art in 2017, when I created a collection of large tapestries made of muslin, charcoal, dry pastel, embroidery thread, and paint. The first piece in the collection "Even When My Eyes Are Closed" is a 4' x 5' tapestry with orange embroidered mouths, ghosts of charcoal hand prints, and the title stenciled in orange dry pastel. The second piece is a smaller charcoal drawing with transparency paper lips stitched into a crucified female body that disappears into a matte black charcoal background. This collection was the first time I used tapestries as a vehicle of understanding and unpacking memory, trauma and spirituality as they sit in the queer body and mind. Something I still explore in many of my pieces.
I continued this process of sewing things into a greater whole until I stumbled into weaving. The first completed woven piece I made is "A Week In Falling"— a 4’ by 2’ paper tapestry made from sketchbook pages, dream journals, and other smaller paper weavings I had made in a week. It has bottle cups, stones and other trinkets from this week of my life. It, similarly to my first collection of tapestries, explores unraveling traumatic memory. The quick nature of making a tapestry in a week deeply impacts the form-making. Interacting with the materiality of old memories, this reveals the context of the dissociative and fractured qualities of trauma.
Inspired by my great grandma's quilts and the passing down of femme labor and crafts, I discovered that weaving, through its history and tradition, has the capacity to be used for pondering, even scrutinizing, notions of labor, femininity, queerness and the body. Through using tactile labor practices and tedious knotting, I take lessons from Sheila Hicks' huge often cascading textile installations and her minimes. She blurred the lines of craft and high art into something sculptural that I want to continue doing with my fiber art. Jessica Campbell's cartoon carpets are a big inspiration of mine as well. Through tufted carpets, Campbell explores feminine trauma and leans into the absurdity of gender by creating comic strips with carpets. As a comic creator and fan, Campbell's work combines two of my favorite kinds of making while bringing in narratives of the private lives and labors of women. Her pieces lean into the hilarity of serious topics in a way that helps me think through my own art making.
Weaving is mainly a linear process but the maximalist flurry of yarn, word, paper or ash allows the viewers eye to loosely imprecisely wander. From textured transparency and non-coherent text to the weathered looked my labor causes, my art pieces often look like they have lived many lives. This comes from the combination of repetitive labor that goes into each of my pieces that slacks them in time, letting them live, breathe, and change as I continue to work on them and the cocktail of materials I use. It is through these repetitive acts, using touch and texture to feel through instead of think through the realities and untruths of femininity, queerness, and memory as they sit in the body.
