Artist Statement

I am a fiber artist and printmaker originally from North Dakota now based in Minneapolis, MN.  My mixed media art work incorporates traditional hand-embroidery techniques, hand-dyed papers and hand-pulled prints – process-intensive fine art mediums combined through collage.

The landscape in the North Dakota plains is a never-ending steady horizon.  In such an environment one learns to find excitement and inquiry in the slightest variation.  For many months of the year the landscape is frozen -- the only interruption to low snow drifts being the regular linear patterns of the surrounding farmland.  My continual lines of running stitches and fields of French knots were born out of inspiration from those windblown spaces.  My work emulates this peaceful beauty, conveying calmness through repetition.  At times my work has a hint of storytelling with the use of my intaglio images as pseudo-illustrations for a kind of narrative when paired with code-like paragraph shapes formed from hand-embroidery. 

 

I stitch by hand, using needle and thread – not by machine.  This is the age of instant electronic communication, the age of getting anything instantly via the internet downloads to your mobile phone.  Sustainable tactics in art creation, things made by the human hand often have the power to promote further human interaction.  I want my work to remind society that non-mechanized art and imagery is still achievable and still experiential.