*Disclaimer* while there is a great deal of glass work on my website (which represents who I was in college as I was getting my BFA from RISD in the glass department, and which I am still proud of making) I have pivoted towards a focus on textiles in my art practice. Accordingly, my artist statement addresses this current state of mind and working habits.
My work is slow, and it is routine; one could even classify it as analog. I am drawn to water felting, wool processing, and embroidery for all the same reasons—the level of tactility each practice affords. I need to feel my materials, each stitch and each fiber, to understand where the work will go. Repetition allows me to think beyond and before what I am making. Such simplicity is profound and beautiful; just look at the range of colors a sheep’s natural fleece can come in.
In sourcing my materials, I try to stay local. Much of my wool comes from sheep that I have helped raise on Dashing Star Farm. What I cannot source from there, I find at farms of friends or small businesses in the Hudson Valley. When I am lucky, small bugs and detritus of interest are locked into the fleeces I acquire. In this way, I feel closer to the natural world and can approach my work from a place of deep, organic healing.
My art practice is ever-evolving—the way I physically manifest my inner world always taking on vastly different forms. Yet my work remains grounded in the same impulse: to share narratives of intimate experiences within the feminized body. This is how I reckon with what it means to be a woman.
As of late, human hair—my own and that of others—has become an important part of my work, down to the ritual of collecting my shed hair after a shower, counting each strand, and taping it to my wall. Human hair is ripe with magical potential, fueled by rituals of care, which I hope to harness in my work.