Although I see myself as an artist working across multiple mediums, fashion touches me insofar that it has a very special relationship with the body. We can’t disengage the medium from a sense of touch; and in that way, it is a very haptic, sensual, corporeal medium. It holds such an intimate place in our daily lives… we touch it every day. I love its hyper sensuality. My work is interested in material culture; our consumption and interaction with materials lead us to embody them. We are permeable, and the things we touch and hold are personal and reveal our value systems.
Textile making, on the other hand, to me is about eroticism, which teaches me fundamental practices for accepting and approaching an unwieldy life. Textile making humbly opens up a broader conversation of negotiating, gaining and relinquishing control. It’s so beautiful really how something so seemingly literal, physical and immediate can present us with opportunities for patience, sensitivity and love that float us above the specifics of day-to-day living that sometimes keep us in trapped and selfish, separate plasms. In textile making, we are the dictatorial subjects manipulating materials.
But in this open dialogue with the things we touch and wrestle with, we are also sometimes rendered the object (not in control) when the material tells us where it does and doesn't want to go. An ongoing balancing and sharing of power – or an empathetic conversation –, the kind of dynamic that happens with all relationships that we hold or build with other things, people, places. Textile making grows me in so many ways – in the world that I create for myself and in the world that I share with everyone and everything else.