My career in designing swimwear had a surprising twist. In twelve years of running the store, staff, and invigorating Seattle’s famously trigger-shy bikini wearers, I got a virtual Ph.D. in what women wanted from swimwear. I cultivated a passion for working with textiles through shape, color, and material, but I began to yearn for a more direct physical connection to my work. It wasn’t until I moved to the charming Victorian Seaport of Port Townsend that I discovered a hands-on response to my love for textiles through weaving.
Four years ago, I decided to take up a non-traditional form of weaving involving only a fairly basic homemade loom, hands, and fibers.
This began as a means to work through anxiety from a major life change, and quickly became a passion. In my discovery of weaving, something clicked, providing a meditative, even therapeutic, sense of rhythm and release like nothing else I had explored before.
In the process of developing my creative aesthetic, I found that the process of weaving strengthened my sense of intuition, while also connecting me more intimately to the natural landscape of the Salish sea coastline. In the past four years, I have dedicated myself full time to the exploration of fiber arts, with forays into rust-dying cloth strips, incorporating seaweed and driftwood alongside brass, copper, and raffia to create textural dreamscapes from my imagination.
The result is richly colored and deeply textured wall tapestries made from natural fibers and dyes.
My artwork emulates and pays homage to undersea lifeforms: clustered barnacles, coral reefs flamboyant with variety and nuance. I spin raw fibers, raffia, flax, silk, linen fabric strips, and a variety of plant and animal fibers. Using a handheld drop spindle, I create fibers whose colors and texture evoke organic lifeforms, often adding in strands of seaweed and bits of nature’s detritus found on seashore walks. I describe my ever-evolving creative process as one that brings me closer to nature and connects me to my senses.
Using mainly half-hitch knots, along with traditional warp and weft techniques I have experimented widely in the process of developing my own distinctive aesthetic. I found the process of weaving strengthened my sense of intuition, grounding my ideas in a daily practice that reveals my inner landscape. I describe my approach to weaving as being instinctive and organic, without planning or sketching the idea beforehand. In the process of creating, I attune to what feels right, and when it doesn’t, I'm known to undo hours’ worth of laborious work until it is.
