Some more interactions with trees

 I'm not sure what it is about the space between trees that is really calling to me these days.   

It feels important, but unclear. 

The branch could have grown in any direction, and it carved out this space by growing the way it did. 

I feel similarly about the shape of rocks, and the space where the rock is not.  

Then there is bark.  I took some impressions of bark, that magical protective, expressive element of the tree. 

Experiments with in between

 A series of preliminary investigations of the spaces between branches of trees.

 

I have been deeply inspired by the practice of Cecilia Vicuña lately. I am taken by her experiments with red thread and her precarios sculptures that were in conversation with the sea. Her poetry and voice are also resonant and vibrating at the back of my mind.  

I am also walking often enough to Randall's Island, a mix of natural and industrial land that the East River wraps around.  I am taken with the branches against the skies and in relationship to one another, as well as the negative spaces in rock formations and between the rocks that hold the river back. 

Factory + Art =

I was able to participate in a group show in an abandoned brewery out in Paterson NJ in November and December. Four floors of artwork, the space was highly conducive to social distancing and beautiful if you love spaces in decay.  My work was installed up on the top floor, among some beautiful circular windows. 

Porous Boundaries

Netting made with linen and cotton, 27' x 5' installation

Porous Boundaries endeavors to explore the nature of what keeps us separate from one another, both in our individual selves and on a macro scale.  Our natural world is full of barriers that are permeable, yet still protective. As we endure a pandemic, we come to understand that our existences intermingle beyond our skin, orifices and even what we can see or hear.  Meanwhile, nation states seek to restrict movement with stark, exact and definitive borders.  Animals can no longer migrate, including people.  The natural order is disrupted as we carve up space and land as if it were finite and constricted by our beliefs.  However, as this pandemic has taught us, the natural world will always regain authority.  Impenetrability remains a myth.

Made of plastic, so fantastic

woven plastic bags with metallic warp, multiple sizes

A plastic bag was found at the deepest known point in the ocean, a depth only recently visited by a human.  Plastics are overtaking our oceans and being swallowed by mammals and suffocating and entrapping others.  Meanwhile, global plastic production is ever increasing, with no signs of ceasing.  An offshoot of the petroleum and natural gas industry, will plastic production ever end?  Even with a plastic bag ban in effect in NYC, they continue to be ubiquitous. 

These weavings, made from bags cut into strips are woven against a metallic weft.  They are the only way I know how to transform the ever growing bag of bags in my home into something of value, something that should not be thrown away.  If plastic will last forever, maybe we can do something else with it instead of suffocating our planet and ourselves. 

Sugarhouse

 Last October I traveled up to beautiful Vermont, near Bellows Falls, and did some experimentation over the weekend with a number of other artists at an old Sugar House.  

It is now a formal residency program for artists seeking to explore the landscape, which is classic Vermont, rolling hills and sugar maples. 

Here are some of my experimentations.  We were two painters, a sculptor, and myself, a textile artist playing with sculptural ideas. 

Weaving with wool

 These tapestries were all woven with wool from sheep that my Dad and his wife Ruth raise up in the Mt. Washington Valley in NH.  I was blessed to grow up around mountains, rivers, lakes and streams.  That and lots of rocks. 

These all take that wool (processed up in Bath, ME), dye it with acid dyes and weave it.  In doing so I transform the wool into neon shapes.   I call these the neon series, and I am currently still working on the fifth in the series.

Plastic Jellyfish

                       

This series began when I read about a whale that had washed ashore the Pacific ocean with over 80 plastic bags in its stomach.  Sea mammals and other sea creatures think the bags floating in the ocean are jellyfish, which they snack on, and they consume the bags to their demise.  

Our single use plastic culture is creating the conditions for devastation of many habitats.  Plastics have become integrated into our ecosystems in a way almost unfathomable.  Recently in a remote region in the Pyrenees plastic plastic micro beads were found falling alongside rain from the sky.   In a recent trip to the deepest place in the ocean humankind has yet traveled, the explorers found a plastic bag. 

   

   

Each piece in this series was designed using machine embroidery software.  Thread colors were chosen to match the colors on the bag, mirroring the ways in which the bags are conceived of by their prey as jellyfish. The embroidered jellyfish on the bag draws the viewer in with its visual language, much as a whale may be drawn to the bag in the sea to satiate its hunger.  In both cases, a material that is transforming the very nature of our world is seducing us. 

This work asks its audience to reconsider our own assumptions about what it means to be human in this consumer driven world. What does reversing course at this point mean?  Can we recreate the past in the future and reestablish a harmonious planetary ecosystem?