Artist Statement

I have had a life long love affair with fabrics and fiber. I learned traditional needle arts from 3 generations of women in my family. While these women used their talents for necessity or hobbies, I have been fortunate to expand on these basic skills expressing myself as a fiber artist. I specialize in realistic representations of natural scenery and incorporate needle art and sewing techniques in different and innovative ways to develop my art. Inspiration begins with places I've been from girlhood vacations in upper Minnesota to my local forest preserve neighborhood, and expands to places I've seen in  trips around the US and beyond. As a life-long mid-westerner, I am particularly inspired by the land around me and the four distinct seasons of the upper Midwest.

I use a wide variety of fabrics and fibers, manipulating them in any way possible to achieve depth and texture in my art. I work with woven fabrics such as batiks, silks, polyesters, and light-weight upholstery.  To these fabrics, used singly or in combination with each other, I add sheers, netting, yarns and other fibers to manipulate color and incorporate layers into my art. This allows me to gain the depth of color necessary to paint pictures with fabric. I study photographs and employ continuous experimentation, refining construction techniques to capture details. 

Recently, I have begun to explore ways to expand the scope of my artistic expression. One way I've done this is through a series dedicated to exploring illumination. I start with a whole cloth background of hand dyed fabric, studying the shapes and lines created by the interplay of colors from the dying process for inspiration on what the final scene will be. From there, I build the piece using sheer fabrics, netting, dyed cheesecloth, yarn and other fibers, resulting in an artwork which has an ethereal, dream-like quality. "At the Edge of Light" (shown) is an example from this series.

Another expansion of my work is the creation of large installations and three dimensional structures from fiber in order to increase the capacity, scale and realism of my work.

From close-up pieces that show fine detail, to panoramic vistas that display sweeping landscapes, to large scale installations, my art illustrates my passion to take the precise color and textural elements found in nature and translate them into meaningful expressions of nature's beauty.