About the work:

The medium in which I choose to work is fiber, primarily flat woven pieces, but lately including vessel forms. I’ve picked this less than common medium, having been drawn to the possibilities of relationships between subliminal texture and the interaction of light and color. 

 

Having taken this route, the weavings can become an embodiment of the freedom to explore how colors relate to each other and to the surface properties of the fibers used. Pure color and specific color combinations of color have the power to speak to each of us, often producing differing responses in each person. By limiting the vocabulary to color and woven texture, the works are better able to stimulate reactions and emotions that these raw color and spatial relationships can have on the viewer.

 

My current work explores the role of the home, and how each of us might relate to ours and those of others. From My House to Your Homeland, is my reaction to the loss of homes in the time of war; the title comes from a line in a poem by June Jordan.  A second set of houses comes from a trip to India, and the exposure to that rich panoply of spiritual resources. Another set includes impressions of characteristics one would like to see in our ideal government.

 

About the artist:

 

After pursuing dual careers in biochemistry and weaving, I left behind a job as director of a biotechnology research lab in 1998 to devote full time to this work. Weaving has been a fervent activity since 1973: initially self-taught with a lap loom and a Sunset Magazine book on hand weaving, but later receiving formal training from a variety of teachers, including Sharon Keech, Libby Platus, Diane Itter, Theo Moorman, Walter Knottingham, Morgan Clifford, Lia Cook, Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei. Formal training in drawing, color and design came from the Alfred Glassel School of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.  Over the years, activities  included lectures, workshop teaching, juror, show organizer and exhibitor in many local, national and international juried and invited shows.

 

Recently work has been included in the United States Department of State Art in Embassies Program, an exhibit at the American Craft Museum in New York and the invitational Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland, from Lausanne to Beijing, Houses for Nomads (a solo exhibition in the Janina Monkute-Marks Museum in Lithuania), and the permanent collection at The Arts Institute of Chicago.