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? 

NYSEE EVERYTHING

Collaborative project with photographer Oge Erike.  Photos were printed onto a poly-satin and then machine embroidered to accentuate the captured moment.

Rarámuri

These are the Rarámuri people, who have the reputation of being long distance runners. A Norwegian claims the name translates to: "runners on foot" or "those who run fast", but this is disputed.  When the Spanish arrived, their name for the Rarámuri people became the Tarahumara.  The Rarámuri ran in footwear they called huaraches when long distance running, sometimes up to 200 miles in 48 hours*

Who else believes Nike owes partial profits from all their Humara and Huarache footwear to the Rarámuri people?  

*source wikipedia

Weaving with flowers today...
 

moonlight silk metal sea

A piece of metal at jacob riis park

doing:

wrapping silk over & through metal, under the moonlight

day after the storm

Tide still on its way out 

        

undoing:

unwrapping from the metal & unburying from the sand

sand post-storm

drying in the seabreeze

a visitor