As a printmaker over 15 years ago, I experimented with fabric to lift prints from rusty farm tools. It was love at first sight! I embraced organic printing, as I called it, because it inspired spontaneity and informed my ideas about process and content. Treating fabric as a vast landscape, I adapted arashi shibori techniques to wrapping rusted pipes, tucking leaves into folds to create additional resists. I prefer to work with silk because it is beautiful and deceptively fragile, but capable (to a point) of surviving the assault of rust printing. Rust is a gorgeous medium, offering an array of colors and exciting, unpredictable patterns when tempered by tea and tannins that defuse the corrosive power of the rust resulting in permanent and stable marks on the fabric. This unsettling recipe of rust and silk goes beyond mere design, however. It is a fitting metaphor for both the fantastic beauty of our earth and the assault on the environment that we are perpetrating to our own detriment.
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| One of the big barns on the larger farm where I grew up. |
BIO
I live in rural Madison County, Illinois with my husband. My studios, one outdoors and one indoors are at our home which is surrounded by over 50 trees many of them walnut and sassafras trees which have played a part in my fiber art. I was a high school art teacher for 25 years before returning to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where in 2003 I earned an MFA specializing in printmaking. Before I started grad school, I had taken a series of workshops in printmaking that essentially changed my life. I found a deep well of inspiration when I began to look to the farm where I grew up and my family and personal experiences there.
With an interest in textiles that began years before, I took my electives in the fibers department where I developed alternative organic printing techniques on silk that I have continued to work with since then. I gave up traditional printing after grad school because of the expense. Now my "press" consists of iron objects, old farm tools and rusty pipes.
I am a member of the Surface Design Association and Missouri Fiber Artists. I have participated in over 80 juried shows and invitationals including three solo shows and have won a number of top prizes. I have also curated 3 large exhibits in the last several years.
I live in rural Madison County, Illinois with my husband. My studios, one outdoors and one indoors are at our home which is surrounded by over 50 trees many of them walnut and sassafras trees which have played a part in my fiber art. I was a high school art teacher for 25 years before returning to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where in 2003 I earned an MFA specializing in printmaking. Before I started grad school, I had taken a series of workshops in printmaking that essentially changed my life. I found a deep well of inspiration when I began to look to the farm where I grew up and my family and personal experiences there.
With an interest in textiles that began years before, I took my electives in the fibers department where I developed alternative organic printing techniques on silk that I have continued to work with since then. I gave up traditional printing after grad school because of the expense. Now my "press" consists of iron objects, old farm tools and rusty pipes.
I am a member of the Surface Design Association and Missouri Fiber Artists. I have participated in over 80 juried shows and invitationals including three solo shows and have won a number of top prizes. I have also curated 3 large exhibits in the last several years.
