Artist statement:
“There is poetry in the detritus of destruction.” -Anselm Kiefer
Being a textile artist opens one’s eyes to the world of materials in strange, beautiful, and sometimes painful ways. Having grown up in the 50’s in Texas, I distinctly recall the widespread practice of roadside littering, which was eventually curbed by the famous ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ campaign. The litter itself was ugly, of course, but it was helpful in making me see the damage created by the endless production of disposable consumer goods. Today in the United States, so much of the collateral damage of people’s actions is hidden from them: their recycling is whisked away to Malaysia, while their industrial air pollution is off-shored to China. Out of sight, out of mind. One of the eye-opening aspects of moving to Mexico twenty years ago was seeing how much of that (normally, hidden) stuff—waste, inequity, suffering, but also so much beauty and joy and tradition—is kept right out in the open here. It forces me to continually ask myself: How much do we really need to be happy? And how much harm is caused by our excesses?
I began my career working with textiles, especially archival and hand-made paper, playing with them to create multi-dimensional layerings of light, color, and texture. But I have since begun incorporating a much wider array of materials and techniques, including roadside trash and other found materials, highlighting the neverending flow of disposable goods that our consumer-capitalist system endlessly produces. Most of my work now contains at least 90% discarded material, including, but certainly not limited to: cardboard boxes, old metal, broken glass, film, pill sleeves, mylar, plastic takeout containers, metal cans, and discarded construction materials. Three techniques that have a special resonance for me at the moment are the use of acid to eat away at styrofoam (an image at once hopeful and haunting); the concentric arrangement of various materials around aluminum cans and loops of metal wire (evoking natural and unnatural cycles); and the use of metal grids—typically, a form of thin-gauge steel wire used to set concrete on construction sites—in order to visually divide and constrain otherwise chaotic/organic compositions, just as we carve up the riot of nature into clean lines. Other themes running through this collection include: aging; decay; addiction; renewal; growth; gestures of lamentation; crisis; abandonment; earthquakes; storms; drought; desertification; deforestation; mining; over-consumption; and over-construction. The larger questions it poses are: Can what is discarded can be repurposed? Can what seems hopelessly tainted be reimagined? Can what is old can ever become new? Or, better yet, can what is old become some new mixture of both-old-and-new, which obviates the need for more and more and more and more new things, forever?
