Without thinking about it, we are familiar with its varied qualities–the simplicity of white cotton, the luxury of silk velvet, the flexibility of knitting, the structure of weaving. We can see history in a piece of fabric, how it wrinkles, stains, takes repairs, unravels. Paper is a kind of nonwoven cloth, and is in fact often made of recycled cotton or linen. It can be dyed, stitched, wrinkled, torn, and repaired much in the same way as fabric. In my studio practice, I use paper and textiles to explore ideas about land use, domestication, and the fragility of our bodies and the world we live in.
Before I became an artist, I was an agricultural worker for most of my life. Being in constant proximity to the land made me conscious of how our collective choices indelibly impact the world we live in. This is part of being human–archaeologists have found remnants of fires that our earliest ancestors made hundreds of thousands of years ago. Ruins from past civilizations are evident around the world, sometimes in places where people still live lives that are adding small contributions to future ruins. Humankind has layered material reminders of our impacts upon the land, year after year, millenia after millenia, which is something that I consider through the process of making my art.
I walk through the world preoccupied, like many people, with a feeling of impending doom from climate change and other human caused environmental disasters. That concern surely does make its way into my art. But I don’t make my work to teach a lesson or create a specific reaction, and I have no illusions that one artist choosing to only use natural materials, as I do, makes an enormous difference to environmental preservation. I just find that those timeless materials offer me more than enough breadth to work with. Ultimately, my work is a conversation between the materials, my inspiration, myself, and the viewer. Many times, people want to reach out and touch my many textured work, and this is part of the point. We are a part of the physical, natural world–we should make contact with it.