I’ve always had a thing for maps – trail maps in particular. They are full of possibilities and tiny meticulously drawn details. The hand-drawn maps of imaginary worlds in Tolkien’s TheHobbit were some of my favorites when I was a kid.
To this day, I still prefer to carry with me a printed map when I go backpacking or when I’m exploring a new route that has many connecting trails and chances for getting lost. In more tricky spots, I frequently have the chance to share a map with other hikers who are unsure of where they are or where to go, and to help them find their way. Even folks using mapping apps will often take a picture of my paper map to guide them.
For a few years I’ve been making drawings and paintings of crumpled paper and plastic bags, and while I could tell something interesting was going on, I couldn’t figure out what direction to take them. Recently while following a thread of ideas, I started making imaginary topographical drawings/trail maps using plastic bags as a reference for the land. Now I’m making a series of them for a solo exhibit in the spring.
Here’s a look at my sketchbook showing the progression of drawings I made to figure out how to make it work (that link goes to Instagram by the way) along with images of other drawings I made along the way.
Also if you’re in or near Winston-Salem, you can see some of my work, including my painting Of Stones and Earth and Air at The Gallery at Stimmel. The work there is available through Artfolios.
The drawing of paper that started it all almost 10 years ago.a drawing of plastic bagsCold Water, oil on canvas, 30×40 inches The big thing in the foreground is actually crumpled up paper.
This Wednesday January 15th, I’m giving a talk as part of Artists’ Network‘s Professional Development Seminar series. During this session, we’ll focus on getting unstuck and building or reigniting a daily art-making practice for the year ahead.
You’ll learn how to carve out time for your art, stay inspired when life gets busy, spark new ideas, and adapt your workspace—whether you’re traveling or working without a dedicated studio.
If you’re ready to embrace your creative goals and make 2025 your most artistic year yet, this workshop is for you!
Happy New Year! I just got back from a walk with my kitten Luna in a cat backpack. Yes, I am now that person who walks their cat in the neighborhood.
I’ve been on winter break and I’ve got a few days ’til the start of spring semester in the School of Film at UNCSA. It’s been nice to have the time and mental bandwidth to retool the classes I’m teaching and to work in the studio, where I’ve got several projects going on.
As we speak, I’m soaking River Birch bark (foraged with a friend) to extract some color and dye the last few hankies I kept aside. You may notice an open container of gesso, a sort of acrylic primer to prepare a birch wood panel for a painting. To get the surface ready to paint on, I applied four thin coats of gesso, sanding in between each one to make a bright white, opaque, smooth surface to work on. I’m looking forward to making this painting. It was commissioned at the end of the year by North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) Winston-Salem, specifically for the Hanes House.
In the last image, you’ll see a screenshot of an in-progress edit of a video piece I’m working on for my upcoming show in the spring. Some of my students were kind enough to help me out for this project and let me shoot their hands while they made an ink drawing of a landscape in Todd, a small community outside of Boone, NC, that saw a lot of damage during Hurricane Helene.
The previous two images are of ink drawing experiments I’m doing to figure out a series of works hopefully for the spring show. In the last few years I’ve made some drawings and paintings of plastic bags and crumpled up paper, but nothing I really dug into. Now I’m making drawings of plastic bags again, this time imagining a large group of them hanging together in a series as sort of imaginary topographies. We’ll see where it goes.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been dyeing hundreds of handkerchiefs using natural dyes as I work on a project for a show in the spring. So far I have successfully worked with madder, weld, cochineal, pomegranate, myrobalan, cutch, various parts of the oak tree, walnut, and indigo.
I waited to work with indigo till I had some experience under my belt. It’s a trickier dye to work with than others because it’s insoluble in water and has to be reduced to a water-soluble form. To make an indigo vat, you have to follow steps to create the chemical reactions needed for the indigo to convert to a dye rather than a pigment.
To make the indigo vat, you have to create an alkaline environment in the vat (adding lye or soda ash to the water for example), remove the oxygen (adding thiourea dioxide in my case), add the indigo “starter” you made earlier, check the pH, adjust the pH to the correct one for the fiber you’re dyeing, then you can start. You then adjust the vat as needed each work session, adding the necessary ingredients for each chemical change to occur.
Other colors are much easier to work with and just involve steeping dyestuff for hours or days.
What’s been so exciting about working with indigo the last 2 weeks is that I’ve added a whole side of the color spectrum to my handkerchief palette. I’ve been able to overdye reds and yellows to make a range of turquoise, greens, violets, and lavenders. If you look at the images below, you’ll notice that some of the handkerchiefs are much darker than others. This involves dipping the hankies multiple times in the indigo, anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes at a time. And the magic of indigo is that when you take fabric out of the vat, it comes out yellow or green and only turns blue in contact with air. It oxidizes over the course of the next 30 minutes to reach its peak blueness. You can then dip it in the vat again to make it darker and bluer.
Giving fabric time to soak in the indigo vat.
A range of colors using indigo alone and overdyed on myrobalan and weld.
A range of colors using indigo overdyed on pomegranate and weld.
A range of colors using indigo overdyed on cochineal and matter.
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.
If you want to get monthly-ish emails with more of my musings and behind the scenes from my studio, you can subscribe here.
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!
