Mobile #12 Sculpture

I am an artist and a mother. I make fiber art sculpture in my home studio while my daughter builds block towers on the floor next to me. I myself grew up crawling around under my mother’s loom while she wove beautiful rugs. Slowly creating things with my hands through traditional fiber arts crafts has always been part of my process for understanding and moving through the world from my very first clumsy stitches as a child to the most ambitious of my recent projects. The handwork processes I work with most frequently are knitting and crochet. These techniques have been practiced throughout history, most often in the home. Both knit and crochet are quite accessible modes of work, mobile and flexible, and requiring only time and patience rather than complex equipment. I feel a connection to handwork for its history and accessibility and for the meditative state of working slowly, stitch by stitch to create something from a strand of yarn. The connection I feel to fiber art as a medium has only deepened upon having my daughter. In childrearing and in fiber art time and presence are paramount. My body and my time have slowed in motherhood and refocused into patterns that have been woven again and again with each generation. Walking these patterns creates for me a bond: a bond to history, to my ancestors, to my child, and to the objects I create. Raising my young daughter, moment by moment and day by day has deepened my understanding and confidence as a person and as an artist. These intertwined elements of my identity combine to form the shape and rhythm of my days and the direction of my work. My most recent body of work is all about balance. In this body of work I combine traditional fiber processes with steel wire to form abstract shapes that balance on the tension between the fabric and the steel. The shapes that emerge describe the movements my hands took in creating them. The multifaceted planes and lines of stitches carve through the air in a way that feels more like a still within a movement than a solid object. The beauty of a finished piece holds within it the countless hours of labor and stumbling (which is to say, life) that it took to make each piece. Most of these are hanging pieces and mobiles. They hang in apparent stillness and then move in response to the air currents in the room. A reminder that balance is not the absence of instability but rather, the presence, the time, the stitches and the steps that we take within it.