RECLAMATION PROJECT

Starting in 2021, while coming to terms with being diagnosed with Scleroderma (a rare autoimmune disease that makes it difficult to do many things, including art making), I found I could no longer make much of my artwork in the ways I had always done. In searching for new ways of making, I started hand quilting, burning, and hand embroidering into paper that I eco-dyed using leaves from my forest floor. The small intuitive quilts are like fragile skins, like maps to unknown places, like the shapes of cells and antibodies under the microscope.  The slow making of them is meditative, giving time and space to consider my grief over the losses I have sustained, to reclaim art in my life in a new way, and to reconsider even the making itself.

For instance, I've been reconsidering how I use raw materials in my work - as a mixed media artist, I have accumulated a wide variety of materials over the years, and I would like to start using, wherever possible, what I have on hand rather than purchasing new materials.  I am now foraging wild materials - especially invasives, salvaging rusted metal parts, recycling scrap and leftover papers, and reclaiming materials to incorporate in my work.   These changes mean that the new work is as responsive to materials as it is to ideas, is created more intuitively, and creates opportunities for me explore new and different questions.