Flower Bed
I draw inspiration from the feelings of haunting and daydreaming, areas in which I can slip from tangible reality into alternate senses of understanding my surroundings: from layers of clothing, to domestic comfort objects such as curtains and blankets, to the insulated walls of dwellings. I create three-dimensional works that play with the gendered conceptions of ‘building’ and ‘making’ a home by contrasting sturdy and soft materials that are at hand, such as scrap fabric and yarn, household items and other remnant building materials.
I am interested in the ephemeral and the felt presence of time and memory held in material things generated through their daily use. The evidence of wear and tear is a simultaneous accumulation of memories and a physical wearing down in a concurrent expansion and disintegration. Focusing on the conceptual space of the home, I am interested in the contradictory feelings of familiarity against a sense of unease, allowing for ambiguous interpretations of these intimate spaces that house the body.
By collecting and pairing materials with one another, I play with formal composition and emotional associations. Cloth and clothing that has been well worn have a soft quality, a felt presence of the body that can be sensed. Whether the histories are known or remain unseen, I believe there is a difference to be felt through these materials. I find them to be grounding for the viewer who can observe my soft sculptures with a sense of recognition and curiosity about their own effect on the world around them.
Flower Bed explores the domesticated wilderness of home gardens that show up in household floral motifs as a way to explore the politics of what is ‘dirty’ versus ‘respectable’ depending on the context and the people involved. Floral imagery can signal innocence but also blatant and sometimes garish female sexuality which plays with what is tamed and confined within the home. Bedsheets are full of connotations pertaining to the bedroom and their owners who spend their nights entangled in the sheets. There is sense of vulnerability of the unconscious bodies that rest as seen through the wear and weight. A new area of investigation I am engaged with is the folding of these items as they are stored and the ‘fitting’ of fitted sheets designed to fit a bed, for sleeping bodies. I think about what is folded and stored out of sight and how we might ‘refit’ them to new circumstances. What falls away, what emerges and what remains hidden.
Pictured Above
1) To Have and to Fold 2) Flower Blobs #1 3) Flower Blobs #2 4) Tired Bed of Flowers