This week has been different for me. I’ve been working on a mural assisting another artist to bring her vision to life.
I’ve been wanting to do more in the public art realm for a while. It’s important to me that art be in the world so everyone can have it in their lives, but while I’ve applied to calls for public art for years, I’ve had very little success. So when the opportunity came up to help Georgie Nakima @gardenofjourney, I jumped at it, and let her know that I’m an experienced painter and that I know how to operate a boom lift. So this week, between teaching classes, I’ve been working on one of Georgie’s murals with a team of artists, and I’m happy to be able to fulfill my goal to bring art out into the community.
This is the last week to help me raise funds so that I can donate to recovery efforts in Western NC. I am donating 50% of all sales in October to help out disaster relief efforts in the Appalachians. Find available work here.
Since I was in graduate school over 20 years ago and discovered cycling, I’ve tried to reconcile my training as an athlete and my practice as an artist. I think that the energy required to do both comes from a similar place and I’ve tried to figure out how to make riding or running or walking my actual artistic practice with varying degrees of success. There is precedent for this – the English artist Hamish Fulton makes the act of walking the central part of his artistic practice. Through his work he elegantly addresses familiarizing oneself with nature as a way to respect it, and that in turn as a way to address climate change. The sort of artifacts that he makes post walk are also tied to the land he travels through their size, form, and materials, but these things he makes are secondary to the walks, more of a way to share the walks with others in a gallery setting.
I always come back to wanting to make things. Making things is how I understand the world around me and how I express my thoughts in the way that is most intuitive, not in a linear way, but in a way that is more meandering. And while I know that riding bikes, running, and walking inspire my work, making those the actual work, hasn’t felt like enough. It hasn’t satisfied the urge to make things.
When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina a few weeks ago, less than 100 miles away, and people’s entire lives were swept away and the actual topography of the mountains violently changed in a moment, everything suddenly seemed very ephemeral. Some of the most destructive aspects of climate change were here.
Climate change is something I’ve wanted to address more directly in my work for a long time, but I think all of the attempts I’ve made would be upsetting for a casual gallery goer, and so they’ve never seen the light of day. It’s important to me that my work at the very least not be depressing for those who experience it, so none of my attempts at addressing the ecological crisis have ever hit the mark for me.
The project I’ve been working on using natural dyes to color handkerchiefs for next spring, coupled with another project I’m expanding on (the boulders from my spring exhibit at The Art Gallery at Congdon Yards, which you can see here at approximately 1 minute into this video tour of the show), together start to address nature and ecological issues through textiles. The hankies suspended in the air are each dyed using natural plant and insect derived dyes that have been used throughout history. The boulders on the ground are made by compressing and tightly binding cast off textiles commercially dyed. As you probably know, the fashion industry pollutes through its processing and dyeing of fabrics and uses astonishing amounts of water. It also creates literal mountains of garbage. These projects will be coupled with other sculpture, video, and sound, that I hope can effectively address climate change while keeping true to my values as an artist. I still believe in beauty and dreaming and poetry.
Last weekend on a forest walk with my husband and our son, I noticed all of the acorns on our path. Acorns, along with oak leaves and bark, can be used to make dyes varying in color from yellow, tan, green, brown, and even violet. The three of us collected pieces from the ground, and later that day, my son and I prepared them for dyeing fabric. He used a hammer to smash the acorns as I whittled away the bark, and we put each collection in a jar with water. They’ll soak for a week or so before I can extract the dye. As for the leaves, I poured boiling water on them, left them to sit overnight in a pot, and simmered them in the morning with hankies. After a day, the hankies were various shades of creamy yellow and orange.
While I still am not clear on how to make a walk my artistic practice (maybe I simply need to declare that it is?), the act of walking and collecting plant matter to generate color for my work is deeply satisfying. I’m enjoying all the research on which plants to use for lasting color, how to extract the color, and tangentially all the social history around textiles and natural dyes, which ties into culture and economy.
I’m curious to see where these projects take me.
My son holding some of the acorns we collected on our forest walk (also to be used for their color)Holding oak leaves and branches from which I’ll extract color
I’ve been working on a project for which I’m collecting handkerchiefs, dyeing them as many different colors as I can, and suspending them from the ceiling for an exhibit that opens next year. I have more than 200 handkerchiefs, many vintage, some donated, some new. Last month, I spent several days preparing the hankies to be dyed. Because they are cotton and I’m using natural dyes, there is a process I follow to make sure they accept the dye and stay that color as long as possible. The project will be exhibited for 4 months and lit by gallery lights, so they need to be lightfast. This process entails washing the fabric, scouring it (to remove any waxes and oils that might be used in the manufacturing process), then mordanting it with gallnut, followed by aluminum acetate, then a quick dip in calcium carbonate. The mordanting process allows the fabric to accept the dye, make the color as intense as possible, and hold onto it, otherwise it would just wash out.
The exhibit next year will be in the Sawtooth School of Art‘s Davis gallery. With them, I’m organizing community events during which we’ll make some of the work for the show. The first of these events was a workshop led by my friend and fellow artist Nicole Asselin last weekend. With the students, we dyed some handkerchiefs using madder, weld, and pomegranate, all natural dyes that have been used for millennia. Students also had a chance to play with the dyes on bandanas they could take home.
Here Nicole presents some key concepts with a bunch of undyed hankies and some common dyestuff in the foreground.
A student keeps an eye on the madder root dye pot.
Dyed hankies: madder on the left, pomegranate center, and weld on the right. Some of the colors have also been modified using an iron bath and citric acid.
Hankies from last night’s work in the dye studio: indigo on the right and weld overdyed with indigo on the left. You can see here the tiny labels that I’m attaching to each hanky with the date and dyestuff used on each one.
I was sick last week: a sinus infection and then a reaction to the antibiotic prescribed for it, and then a new antibiotic… and boy did all that kick my ass. Having no choice but to rest, I had to miss teaching most of my classes, and when I did go back to work, I couldn’t make it a full day. During that time, I did a lot of thinking, and had a lot of questions around my art practice. Some self-doubt crept in too, and it was when I came out on the other end this week, that the gratitude of feeling better – of having the energy to get back to some exercise and to feel like I was firing on all cylinders when teaching – that I had a new perspective on my work.
In the last few years, because my practice extended into mediums other than painting and drawing, I have wondered if I was diluting my work, or missing out on the kind of growth that comes with focusing on one medium, or if I might be perceived as not being a serious artist, and on and on… the kind of thinking that might sometimes help strengthen beliefs, but that more often brings on generally crappy feelings.
The kind of gratitude I am feeling – the kind that comes from feeling OK after having been sick – is a clarity that I am on the right path and that I am growing as an artist. The growth is subtle now and my path isn’t linear, but that’s OK.
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That Good Darkness, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
This painting That Good Darkness is available from Artfolios here.
I’m working on a new project for my show at the Sawtooth School’s Davis Gallery opening in April 2025. For this project I’m using natural dyes from plants to dye handkerchiefs – some vintage and some new – before suspending them overhead as part of a larger installation.
I’m teaming up with artist Nicole Asselin (one of the owners of the Village Fabric Shop) to run a Natural Dye workshop at the Sawtooth School on Friday September 27th at 6:00 – 8:30pm.
In this workshop, students will learn how to prepare fabric for dyeing and explore the foundational concepts of working with dye extracts and color modifiers. In addition to dying some hankies used for the installation, students will also make and take home a mini natural dye pallet “swatch book” and two custom dyed bandanas. All participants will also be recognized for their participation at the exhibit.
If you’d like to learn how to use natural dyes and assist me in making an art installation, you can sign up for this workshop here. Cheers!
I’m happy to announce that the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem (formerly known as SECCA) acquired my painting New River Gorge for their Portable Gallery outreach program.
Through the portable gallery program, individual artworks are mounted in road cases (the same ones musicians use to carry gear) and brought to classrooms across the region as part of a teaching library. Students have access to real artwork made by living artists.
I’m honored my work was chosen for this program, and love the idea that one of my paintings gets to travel and be experienced by kids who may not often go to museums.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to say that art education matters!
Last summer in June 2023, one of my paintings, Field and Forest with Pink, was carefully packed up by an art shipper and left my studio to travel to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. At the time, I wrote about it here.
Recently I received a surprise package from the Department of State containing some catalogs featuring my work along with the other paintings in the Bishkek exhibit. Happily, they also sent me a link to share so that you can view it online. You can peruse the exhibition catalog here.
I love that this Art in Embassies program exists, and I can’t believe that my artwork is being used as a kind of soft power for diplomacy.
Field And Forest With Pink, acrylic on wood, 18 x 24 inches
I’m back from a mind blowing 2 weeks at Penland School of Craft learning to work glass with Jessica Jane Julius and Erica Rosenfeld. Our workshop culminated in an edible installation and performance in the hot shop. I had never worked with glass before, and have a whole new appreciation for how complex the medium is. The experience also opened up my eyes to what performance and installation could be. I came home full of ideas and stoked to make new work!
I’m not sure how this will play out in my work yet. I realized while I was there that I was particularly interested in the optical qualities of glass, like making lenses and prisms for example. I’ve played with distortion and blurring of images both in my painting and video work, and I’m curious about how using a glass element could alter something seen through it.
I also wanted to make simple well balanced vessels while I was there, and learned how challenging it is to make elegant shapes with glass. You have to work quickly while it’s hot, with the correct amount of force, and a surprisingly light subtle touch. And it’s the most humbling of materials. It can be impossible to save pieces when things go wrong, and failure is catastrophic. Pieces often deformed beyond repair and/or shattered.
I enjoyed cold working glass – the work you do using shop tools to work the glass after it’s been annealed. The tools felt familiar – they are similar to wood shop tools. The tools use diamond grit to cut and grind, and aren’t as sharp or abrasive as wood tools. Water is used throughout the cold working process to keep the glass cool and to rinse off the silica as it is ground or cut off. It was satisfying to properly finish my pieces or in some cases to alter them completely using these tools.
I loved working in the hot shop. With four furnaces and all sorts of torches constantly running, it was the hottest environment I’ve ever worked in – over 100F during the day – and the work is very physical. The pipes and rods used to gather and heat the glass are long and heavy, and you have to keep rotating them as you work. Working in teams was another highlight – we all depended on each other to make work.
My team working together to make a dome during the performancethe Penland hot shop!Day 1 – pressing shapes into the hot glass fresh out of the furnacethe class installation with foodsome of my workthe Lily Pond I accidentally found when I got off trail on a walkthe view from the Pines food hall
