My obsession to create using cloth began when I was eight making doll clothes. It followed me throughout my youth, kept its eye on me while I studied traditional art making, dogged me relentlessly until I had no other choice but to turn and face it. As a young person I struggled internally with the idea of being an artist in general let alone an artist using something as unconventional as cloth as a primary medium. Externally, I also felt the cultural pressure to fashion a useful life.
With a various and checkered education in both useful subjects and art making and after many years of engaging in useful occupations, I gave in to the persistent call of the cloth. I declared myself an artist and thus began my career as a fiber/cloth/mixed media/quilt artist. That was over twenty years ago.
I have exhibited and sold my work throughout the United States and have won my fair share of awards. In my university days, a sculpture (before cloth) was selected as the purchase prize. Later, exhibiting at juried fine art shows, I received several first and second place awards, as well as a number of awards of merit. Recognition is a wonderful thing, but making art for commercial markets that have their own ideas of how my fiber/mixed media art fit over their sofas, was not enough for me. I had things to say and wanted to say them with art, not just decorate walls.
Several years ago, I set myself to the task of remaking my art. I pushed the edges of cloth, ripped and unraveled seams, cut apart and threw out old cloth attempts at art making. I dyed, stamped, stitched, beaded, quilted and when I looked up from the work that came from the toes of my soul, I discovered a new movement had entered the art world. Women, mostly, were not just using cloth to make quilts for their beds, they were using cloth and just about anything else they could stitch down to make art. The Art Quilt was born out of a need many other women also had to express ideas in cloth.
Snipping, sewing, fusing, I layer ideas, quilt shards of ancient memories, bead the feminine experience in and through hand-dyed, painted and stamped cloth. Doll clothes led me to Art Quilts. Struggles of my youth and young ideas about life dipped deeply into the well of the feminine experience. Cloth has wraped itself around me and continually challenges me to find new ways of expressing the spirit that draws the needle through heaps of ideas and years of love of the cloth.