Description
As an artist devoted to the medium of textiles, pattern is an innate building block for both technique and meaning – patterns are the bricks we build our temples with as workers of cloth, after all. And the materials I gravitate towards are always embedded with stories, histories and human touch. The work in this exhibition draws from my experiences of paying close attention to patterns and materials both near and from from home, and thinking about their allegorical potentials.
In “Cosmati,” I am thinking about the relationship between patchwork quilt designs and the incredible patterned Cosmatesque floors of Medieval Italian churches which repurposed stone from ancient Roman buildings for new sites of worship. In the case of my work, I’m using only materials that exist in their current state in my studio – leftovers from previous projects or ideas that never came to fruition, leftover natural dye samples from my university students. Both of these art forms make use of scraps and leftovers, cleverly transforming materials that originated in contexts such as clothing the body or covering the walls of ancient temples, into something new and symbolically rich. The circles, triangles, squares and other geometric shapes used in these pattern systems are also assigned symbolic meanings within their transformed contexts. In this body of work, I am taking the fragments of my own creative past and building with them the foundation for a new site of devotion, rich with personal history and significance.
