Textile creation for “Common Threads” project in honor of St. Brigid
I am the Irish Consulate of San Francisco’s chosen artist to participate in a global project: “Common Threads” in celebration of St. Brigid’s Day 2023. See the gallery showcasing each piece and the artist who created it. As an Irish-American using materials endemic to this place where I live, I am contributing a small part of a larger cloak or “brat” to be assembled from pieces coming from all over the world and to be exhibited in Dublin in February […]
Foraging for Color
I began experimenting with using foraged plants and flowers and food scraps in my own kitchen as natural dye materials in 2017. For regular updates on this, head over to my IG feed: @sfurbanwanderer. For a fiber and textile fanatic who loves color, this was probably an inevitable exploration. I am the kind of person who takes photos like this at museums (from the Vasa Museet in Stockholm) and reads books like this for fun. As I began to learn […]
Wedding banner, now baby room banner
In 2011, I was asked to create a piece of art for my friends’ wedding. Sean Burns and Claire Duplantier had asked four artists—Mona Caron, Ona Lesassier, Paz de la Calzada, and myself—to each create something to adorn the site of the wedding, framing the entry to the two lodges at the wedding site. We were also asked to imagine the pieces flanking Sean’s musical performances or beautifying their future home. The buildings, Main Lodge and Heart Lodge, at Saratoga […]
Shibori using a natural dye
I’ve been crazy about shibori, a resist dye technique, since I bought a piece of fabric in 1996 with the small tie dye geometric patterning. My romanticized idea of the process was that the cloth was tied around pieces of rice then submerged in a dye bath. It was only later I found out what the technique was called and how it worked (and I haven’t seen any substantiation for this idea I had earlier). I’ve since brought several other […]
Nautical November
i’m writing this to the percussive sound of raindrops on metal and glass and with images of flooded streets, subways, sites of construction (NYC) and washed out fields, foundations, and farms (haiti) in my head. it feels like we’re all gonna have to learn to sail our bicycles through the rising seawaters… a few years ago i helped organize a bike ride around the future shoreline of the City, based on other similar rides that preceded it, with the focus […]