When I am drawing I am trying to understand and communicate with the world using an ever-changing vocabulary of marks. The drawings made for my first fabric collection—GLYPHS—were born from a series of marks asking questions around 'what can language be made of?' I think about the symbols from this collection as markers that could stand for ideas, time, and emotion and they serve as visual space holders to represent entire landscapes of experience.
Each pattern in the collection was named in honor of an African American women writer, poet or playwright from post-Civil War America, through the Harlem Renaissance to present day. These were but a few of the ancestors & teachers whom I consider to be the rich foundation from where I get to experience what language can do—how it can remember histories, imagine futures, and leave spaces to contain new unfolding experiences.
ROOT: something embedded, fundamental, and very connected to the whole. the origin of something; also the foundation. where one thing comes from. a current starting point and a connector to future becoming. what might be found in math, code & trees? in us? For the fabric collection that makes up ROOT, I wanted to use the language already inherent in the fields of mathematics, computing, ecology, and linguistics to draw my way into some kind of shared space between the worlds & possibly uncover where they trickle into one another. If the patterns in GLYPHS were pre-language, nestled in between black and white before systems were built, then the ROOT collection is rushing forward with shapes and ideas colliding, with color running wild on the surface.
Working on RAVEL was an amazing opportunity to continue my visual exploration into shapes. For this collection, I focused on the modern Roman alphabet (aka the 26 letterforms from A—Z ) as the primary shapes I wanted to work with. RAVEL became a collection of prints about these shapes coming together and falling apart. While creating, my main questions circled around a.) How can I break letters apart into new, interesting forms and also b.) Is it possible to obscure these already imbued symbols so much that they ‘lose’ their meaning? The letterforms in RAVEL run the gamut from being clear & legible to fractured, to finally some forms completely disintegrating into their environments.
According to Merriam-Webster, a contronym is a word having two meanings that contradict one another, so finding the word RAVEL was perfect for bringing all these ideas together in ‘collection’ form. RAVEL means both to tangle and to untangle, which is a wonderful way to think about these visual shapes in space.
LINEAGE is the collection that arrived after spending a summer making lines and playing around with the question, ‘When does a line become a stripe?’ The patterns that resulted from those explorations became a diverse compilation of drawings and collages, reveling in the beauty of a line, whether it be simple or complex. Then, thinking about the infinite ways those individual lines could evolve into stripes. During the making of the collection, I came to appreciate that one line alone can’t be a good stripe. Stripes by their very nature are pieces gathered, like families, standing side by side, making and taking up space together in a community. This collection is also a promise fulfilled to my cousin Sarah, an amazing quilter and the ultimate lover of stripes. Years ago, she asked me to create a stripe pattern, and from that one ask LINEAGE was born. To Sarah and stripe lovers everywhere, this is for you.
