From my first creative acts, repetition and pattern have been dominant features. My relationship with pattern changed dramatically sixteen years ago when I began working as a freelance textile designer in the garment industry in NYC. The four years I spent in this day job expanded my technical abilities and deepened my overall relationship with repeating patterns. However, it also expanded my knowledge of the industrial side of textile manufacturing, built on ever-increasing consumption and waste. This experience shifted my ideas about our complex relationship to productivity, and inspired my current practice, which centers sustained observation, the subtleties of handmade process, and visual language.

The starting point for the majority of my current work is mass-produced fabric items. I usually discover these items in thrift stores. Sometimes they are given to me, or I find them in the street. Each item is carefully collected, and when one is chosen as the source material for a painting – or more likely, a body of paintings – I spend an enormous amount of time working with it, reversing the process of mass production. Giving such attention to quickly made objects is built into my process. The conceptual underpinnings, careful consideration of visual language, and labor-intensive practice produce a particular materiality, where poetic meaning can unfold over time.

For Indigo Rising, my dear friend Anne’s old blue polyester shirt serves as still life material. One day, while I was visiting her in LA, she tossed me this shirt. Right away, I saw the moon. 

In Time and Repetition is based on four items: a polyester shirt from Idol in San Francisco, a polyester skirt from Village Discount Outlet Thrift in Columbus, Ohio, a tablecloth from New Bohemia in Austin, Texas, and a woven skirt which was left on the paper cutter at Creativity Explored art studio in San Francisco. 

The Curtains series focuses on a synthetic curtain from Goodwill Central Texas in Austin, Texas.