My art, based on personal experience and the cultural environment, describes a world which balances security with vulnerability. I create pieces to investigate issues of containment. I am curious about how clothes or skin contain the body, how language contains thought, how environment or packaging contains identity. My work allows me to play with the contradiction of accessible and inaccessible spaces. It is inviting yet deliberately mysterious.
Each piece is influenced by my desire to share and withhold. An extremely personal poem may be rendered illegible by irregular stitches while a nagging thought or word is clearly spelled out. I invent a dialect combining illusion and reality. I am inspired by textiles created by other cultures and the powerful meanings attached to them. The textile medium replaces language for describing an event, a place, or a memory.
As I work , my environment becomes transformed into a fantasy landscape. I lose myself in its territory of abstract thought; the power of my industrial sewing machine grounds me in reality. The machine becomes a drawing tool. Patterns often derive out of allegories I write to myself in thread. I slip into the reverie of the process, like a long train journey with intriguing scenery. I strive to make something aesthetically beautiful yet meaningful and contemplative.
Creating art gives me space and time to gather my thoughts, enabling me to express what I can't articulate with words. Threads transform into colored pencil lines of ethereal writing or compact blocks of textured color. In this way, threads metaphorically mimic life's simple, linear qualities which in abundance are transformed into fabrics dense or delicate, supportive or fragile.