Artist Statement
My work explores the passage of time through repetitive actions in the hand-made, the hand-knotted, the hand-stitched. These quiet actions become rituals, meditations, allowing me to approach the time held, paused, and passed in liminal spaces.
There is a long history of artists exploring walking not only as a method of transport, but as a generative activity. Like walking, I understand making to be a form of thinking, traveling, and making meaning. The rhythms of knotting, knitting and weaving create space between threads, giving room to access the undefined. Within the minute variations in repetition emerges a way of articulating a loss of words—a way of accessing spaces where language has slipped beyond our grasp.
The type of knowing that comes through repetitive making can also be conceptualized as belief developed through ritual. Catherine Bell explains in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice that participants in ritual do not have to necessarily think (or believe) in a ritual to experience transformation because partaking in an action with our bodies forms our minds. Bell’s ideas align with neurological research on the way movement or thought patterns physically re-structure the pathways of our brain. This back-and-forth between thinking as making, and making as thinking reiterates the ways other knowledges form.
My work investigates the unknown spaces between life and death, water and sky—where language fails us, but we are deeply alive. I think of these liminal spaces as horizon lines. Perhaps the feeling of the horizon line can be described as when you are aware that you are walking on the edge of earth; of ecstasy; of the time between sleep and waking, where two realms seem porous and easily crossed.
I use subtle or fragile materials—thread, paper, and earth— that reflect our fragility and precariousness, and play upon our sense of touch. The repetitive practice of stitching holds time and energy in fabric, net, or paper. Weaving places each weft/ line on the horizon and organizes chaos. Weaving double cloth literally joins two planes into one. Each thread is insignificant on its own, but a few more form a structure, full of tiny holes—interstices that are surprisingly strong. And that cloth, with its two sides/two realms, folds to bring the horizon lines out of two dimensions into three and four. This is my experience of the horizon line and of weaving—traveling between my own existence and the unknown.