Textile

They are so personal, like a sense-memory. In the same way that scents can recall vivid yet undefinable moments of the past, patterns and textures etch themselves into my memory. Touch and material are a part of every second of our lives from birth to death.

They are never too big to move, too expensive to make, too indifferent to be left behind. Some twenty-or-so works are folded up neatly in a shoebox and follow me through all of my changing places. This little box, family within reach, my cat sleeping by my side, these are my Space and these are my Art. The Studio becomes irrelevant.

Recent Work

State of the Union, Textile (Cotton), approx 5'x9', 2025

State of the Union Artist Statement

The American flag, torn into two, stitched together with the word “reunite”. This idea was a call to action and a prayer of hope.

In Spring of 2025, I found a small fabric study that I had made based on this concept, on mending two halves into a whole, and decided to attempt the full creation at the scale of a casket flag. However, as I worked the fabric, as time passed and events developed, the vision changed. I was having a very hard time figuring out how to reunite the two pieces, and I was losing hope in the possibility of this wish coming true. The image flashed before me of a flag, a nation, not in pieces that could be mended, but burning from within. The quilt block that I selected as a base of these stripes was Broken Dishes— one of America’s earliest recorded blocks, a symbol for something unmendable, and a sign used by quilters in the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War. The block was at once a link to our country’s torrid history, a metaphor for hopelessness, and a memorial for the heroes who had refused to give up hope.

As I was working on this quilt with red, white, and blue fabric all around my studio, I was starting to collect some very different fabric. A pile of orange, yellow, green, and rust was growing in the corner. A hexagon template was already set aside for a beehive quilt that was starting to take form. This is when I began reading “Honeybee Democracy” by Thomas Seely, and suddenly my two passion projects snapped together with a joint purpose. I began adding and layering hexagons under broken dishes, letting the patriotic stars burn away, leaving something raw and organic behind.

The destructive fire is not born out of hate or rebellion, but observation. I, and the viewer, become helpless watching a destruction that seems to have become inevitable. The beehive, born out of the fire, begs a question, my question— When the structure of our current system burns away, as is already in the process, will we be left with a purer form of democracy as even the bees have, or will we have become drones in service of the hive mind?