Intertwined, 2011
Lightjet c-prints, 8 x 10 inches each, thread, frames, easels. Collaboration with Erin Frost.
Embroidery
Bundle of Joy (for Mom), 2011
Hand-embroidered postcard. 9 x 4 inches.
A gift for my mom.
This one was fun. I want to work with more panoramic imagery!
More: Embroidery
500/500, 2011
Hand-embroidered collage. 7-3/4 x 11 inches.
I was asked to create a piece which visually responded to a favorite poem.
Not being a poetry connoisseur, I decided to respond to lyrics from a favorite song. Being a life-long lover of music, it wasn’t easy choosing from so many amazing lyricists, but I felt immediately drawn to work by Spencer Krug, whose songwriting and musical abilities have enchanted me since I first heard Sunset Rubdown’s early EPs. (His band repertoire also includes Wolf Parade, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, Fifths of Seven and more.)
One of my favorite bits of his lyrical output can be heard in the song All Fires, an acoustic campfire tragedy which relates the story of a flooded town, a burning love, and the desperation of survival (full lyrics with art detail below). The stirring imagery of ‘a world of water’ and burning fires led me to attempt a visual narrative with the piece–the 50/50 light/dark of it fitting with an ongoing fascination of mine. I was lucky enough to find a perfectly composed steeple image in a book of photographs published in the 80s, which I cut up before flooding and setting afire with thread…
More: Collage / Embroidery
There Will Be No End / There Was Never a Beginning, 2011
left: There Will Be No End, right: There Was Never a Beginning. Hand-embroidered magazines (Rolling Stone and National Geographic, March 1982). 10-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches and 7 x 9 inches
Created for a group exhibition called ‘Being There’ which explored themes of existence and the physical occupation of space.
I decided to work with something that has existed as long as I have and chose two magazines published the month I was born. I considered a lot of other publications–eBay provides!–but I liked that my parents probably would have come across these, and appreciated the way the two contrasted in content.
The pattern I sewed into the covers was taken from a gift I was given on my birthday this year. While somewhat explosive, I hoped the exact repetition might hint at the possibility of a cycle, with a method to its madness.
With this set of works I’m thinking a lot about how my birth could not really be called my beginning. Just as it took paper, ink, ideas, writers, designers and more to put together the magazines, so too is my own existence as convoluted and juxtaposed. In this regard, I cannot even say that conception was my beginning, and as Nick Cave once put it, death is not the end.
View individually: There Will Be No End / There Was Never a Beginning
