“I’m sitting on the porch in the rain after getting home from the brew pub on Father’s Day 2021. I am imagining he is here with me, together silently sitting. Him smoking his pipe, perhaps reading. Me able to be comfortably silent with him.”
I wrote these words in the notes of my phone on the father’s day after my papa died. I miss him in moments. He is there in those memories. Not in the ground. He is in tendencies and traits remembered. He is in every queen anne’s lace I see, in sitting on the porch, in digging holes at the lake.
Confessions Of A Joy Seeker is composed of seven weavings, or confessions, with a video playing over the space. As a whole, this work is the tension I feel between Heaven and earth. Each confession is a facet of where I see, and where I seek to find joy. Through the video you see the sun, slowly rising, reflected in a body of water.
Confessions Of A Joy Seeker is my thesis work from the Indiana University Fibers program in 2019.
Embroidered text reads, “even as I long for forever, my soul sings”.
I am an aggressive optimist and I have driven my work to reflect this. I want to make grand statements about the existence of joy! But inherent in optimism is deception. This world just doesn’t emit as much joy as I like to think. Instead joy is joy because not all is joy. So, I hold these in tension—the belief in what’s good and joyful and a real life lived.
Confession of a Joy Seeker is 21” wide and 7’ long. It is my thesis thoughts in statement form. It is woven and embroidered with monofilament using plain weave.
Weaving is a metaphor. For a while now, I’ve had this picture in my head where everybody around me is a thread. All these threads come together and interact, connecting, pulling, and running alongside each other at different points; each affecting the path of its surrounding threads. I am who I am, thanks to all the people whose threads have interacted with mine.
Threads is 14” wide and 7’ long. It is like the acknowledgment page at the back of a book where the author thanks everybody who helped in writing the book. Except this is not a book. It is a weaving. It is woven with found yarn, gifted yarn, naturally dyed yarn, and monofilament woven using inlay on plain weave.
In my obsession with joy, I’ve surrounded myself with joyful things. They are colorful. Golden. Light. I’ve been interested in light for its beauty as well as for its symbolism. A great deal of my attraction to light is in its absence; where light and shadow interact.
Using my mom’s landscape architecture college textbook, I researched each of the plants in my yard at home, looking for the amount of light each plant needed. Out of all the plants, Hydrangea Quercifolia likes the most light and the Spirea Prunifolia likes the most shade. The two plants are represented here in form, shyly overlapping.
The primary dictionary definition of imbibe is ‘to consume (liquids) by drinking; drink’. Here I use Imbibe to title a piece showing how I spend my time.
As a consumer, I want every experience, to learn every skill, to pursue every friend. A little for this, a little for that, a drop there, three drops there. So I end up spending my time in fragments. Each time I sat down to work on this weaving I would change the color yarn, marking how I fracture my time, and how I seek to have and to do it all.
Imbibe is 13” wide and 7’ long. This piece is a chart of my continual search for joy and contentment. It is woven with naturally dyed cotton yarn and monofilament using interlocking weft on plain weave.
There are moments where we feel our souls sing, where for just a moment, everything is beauty; everything is right, and light, and golden. These moments are scattered, rarely in the same place twice. I’ve found them in laughter, easy and erupting. I’ve found them in the leaves at golden hour. I’ve found moments in skies. Skies with stars so large and bright and present. It’s bittersweet. I long for these moments to last, and know they can’t.
The Search is 9” wide and 7’ long. This piece is an ode to that sky and an abstraction of the search for the place where a soul can sing. It is woven indigo dyed cotton and monofilament and metallic thread using a 3-1 rib twill.
I love my family, and yet they will never fill me. My friends make me laugh, and yet they will never fill me. I love learning, but knowledge will never fill me. There’s always the next notch to achieve.
Satisfied is 16” wide and 7’ longe. It expresses the gaps that exist in this world. It is woven with linen and monofilament using plain weave with a spaced warp.
Not everything can be joyful, but joy isn’t false.
As an aggressive optimist with an outsourced hope, this world will never fully satisfy, and our time here will end. But even while I long for Forever, my soul sings.
This piece is 13” wide and 7’ long. It is woven with shadow weave using monofilament and yarn dyed with goldenrod: a bright yellow flower
producing a light golden dye. This dye has been, and remains, one of my stubborn statements of joy.
The third work in my series of color cartography, Souvenirs: Collection III, collects the memories of my day in and day out routines in Bloomington, IN the town where I went to college.
Color Cartography is a series of works in which I use natural dyes to remember. Souvenir is the French word for memory, or remembrance. There are places I love, places I don’t want to leave or forget. In response to this, I was motivated to start collecting my memories. But how can you collect a collection of intangible things?
Almost every plant - when reduced - will produce color which then can be used to dye fabric. Each of the colors you see in these pieces came from the green leaves of different plants. Each of these plants is taken from a location of significance, so that there is a bit of each place uniquely encapsulated within the fiber of each piece.
Prompted to participate in an installation for the season of Pentecost at my home church, I started looking at the language used at the arrival of the Holy Spirit. I was intrigued by the phrasing used, and the association with water which shapes the way the the way we see the Spirit coming. The Spirit is being poured out, the people are being filled up. Responding to this visual language these weavings act as water being poured out while vessels are reciprocally being filled up. The Helper is present with us, He fills us.
John 16:7
“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go I will send him to you.”
Acts 2:1-4, 16-17a
“1 When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
…
16 But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel: 17 “‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, …”
(emphasis added)
In Situ. Poured Out / Filled Up in original installation location at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis, IN.
Accompanying work by other artists.
The second work in my series of color cartography, Collection II collects the memories of my time spent in Aix-en-Provence, FR, where I studied abroad.
Color Cartography is a series of works in which I use natural dyes to remember. Souvenir is the French word for memory, or remembrance. There are places I love, places I don’t want to leave or forget. In response to this, I was motivated to start collecting my memories. But how can you collect a collection of intangible things?
Almost every plant - when reduced - will produce color which then can be used to dye fabric. Each of the colors you see in these pieces came from the green leaves of different plants. Each of these plants is taken from a location of significance, so that there is a bit of each place uniquely encapsulated within the fiber of each piece.
Color Play 2 came out of a season of being fascinated by the quality and materiality of silk organza and silk gauze; the way they moved and the way they could layer together to build color. This piece is composed of six naturally dyed, silk gauze scrims, a series of color studies along the wall, and video played overtop; showing a figure skipping rocks.
With the addition of video, the colored panels turned from a concentration on color to a ground for light and movement.
The first work in the series Color Cartography, Collection I collects moments from my grandparents and their home and garden.
Color Cartography is a series of works in which I use natural dyes to remember. Souvenir is the French word for memory, or remembrance. There are places I love, places I don’t want to leave or forget. In response to this, I was motivated to start collecting my memories. But how can you collect a collection of intangible things?
Almost every plant - when reduced - will produce color which then can be used to dye fabric. Each of the colors you see in these pieces came from the green leaves of different plants. Each of these plants is taken from a location of significance, so that there is a bit of each place uniquely encapsulated within the fiber of each piece.
lithograph
linoleum print
charcoal
acrylic
watercolor
AP art breadth
sharpie & paint
AP art breadth
acrylic & muslin
AP art breadth
mixed media: acrylic, paper, fabric, thread
AP art concentration
mixed media: image transfer, paper, fabric, thread
AP art concentration
mixed media: acrylic, paper, thread
AP art concentration
mixed media: image transfer, acrylic, paper, thread
AP art concentration
mixed media: image transfer, acrylic, paper, thread
AP art concentration
This page is dedicated to moments of play, not complete pieces, but visual practice and research as I work through ideas.
