Description

I use intimate hand processes of weaving, dyeing, and coiling to explore loss, care, and possibility within the context of intertwined ecological and health crises. Much of my recent research looks to trees as vital elements of our knowledge systems, immune systems, climate systems, and circulatory systems, who, like us, are harmed by the fossil fuel and chemical-intensive systems we live within. I blend science and humanities research with my lived experience of a place, and blend handcraft with digital tools in order to retrace and reimagine relationships between ecological and corporeal bodies. Simultaneously referencing landscape and body, works often share qualities with textiles connected to practices of grieving and care, such as hospital gauze, blankets, and shrouds.   Handwoven on a digital jacquard loom from a combination of plant, insect, and petrochemical-derived materials, the tree fragments in this exhibition embody connections between extraction, illness, species loss, and pollution. In Arterial Forest, I weave silhouettes of critically endangered species, suspending the forms upside-down to recall lungs, arteries, and roots—all parts of usually invisible, life-enabling circulatory systems. In Memories of Future Fires, I translate images of trees killed in wildfires using woven patterns informed by flames and cells. Mounted on paper, they also reference drawing with charcoal—the black carbon residue of burned wood. Short of Breath attends to the impact of the emerald ash borer on human health and urban forests. As the invasive insects block nutrient flow and kill trees, they leave winding patterns under the bark. I weave tracings of these scars in plastic patterns that eat away at cotton and linen cloth, just as the insect larvae eat away at the trees. Because ash die-off leads to increasing respiratory and cardiovascular disease, many of these scars are emerald-green, sharing their color with plastic oxygen tubing, linking the faltering circulatory systems of trees and humans.