A Pandemic Collection
When the pandemic began, I started writing. I wanted to document what I was feeling, the confusion, disruption, and forced change in our lives. I sat here hoping that things would go “back to normal,” as the year wore on, I worked on my textiles, taught my classes on zoom, with my kids at home doing school, and my husband across from me, also on zoom. Although I have been making textiles and prints for coming up on six years, I was making my work previously, to a standard, or as we say in the classroom, obeying the “rules.” I was printing and sewing, perhaps to just stay sane and to have something in my life that felt normal. It was in that time that I started to realize how not normal everything is and perhaps how it never was. The pandemic allowed me, for the first time, perhaps in my life, to take notice of things I hadn’t before. I was able to truly observe the world in a way that was void of noise. Our lives literally stopped. Creatively, allowing me to really find where I am as a maker. I began to meditate and look inside myself like I never had before. I am allowing myself a freedom from expectations, I am closing my eyes, and making the work that I see in my mind. I came through all of this with only one artist statement and a new way of making.
My work is a reflection of life, or how I view it. It is not about meeting an expectation of what life has set out for me, it’s about overlapping moments, unexpected encounters, elegant simplicity, and sometimes bold statements. My work is a reflection of the complexity of the relationship between humans and nature within the built environment. Our world pretends to have systems, systems that promise things, but as I live, I come to realize that these systems are so complicated and dense. Everyone fighting for light, for an issue, for others, this great tension creating moments of beauty when justice has been found. My work and my making is an expression of that overlap, the growth, but also the realization that none of us knows how we will evolve.
My work is created in a way that can not be replicated by a machine. The work I make has to be hand produced, and in the hand work, the final composition takes shape. The overlapping of forms, the mixing of colors, and the moment in the making that brings it to life. I have created my own system, but it is one that is defined by the unexpected, change and whim.