statement
My work evolves out of a continuous process of breaking down and rebuilding: tearing up cloth and old prints to make paper, tearing up my prints, sewing them back together and printing on them again, tearing up clothing I have knitted to produce forms that stand in for the body or its parts. For me this obsessive practice harkens back to domestic "women's work": making old clothing into quilts, bedsheets into bandages, rags into rugs.
A few summers ago I visited a shop that had for sale several small pieces of Coptic textiles from the third and fourth centuries. They were so tightly woven that the passage of sixteen hundred years had barely loosened the threads at the torn edges of the cloth. I thought a lot about the women who had woven them, and about their hands. The knitting in my work is never whole, but always fragmented, torn and unravelling—it resembles fossils: bits of bone, spine, pelvis and ribcage in bloodied soil. Many of the knitted scraps that I use are cut from clothing I made in the past, and to me they signify those fragments of ancient textiles; the intricacy of weave or knit contains a powerful memory of the hands that made it, just as stains, tears and creases in a garment contain a memory of the body that wore it.
My part-time work as an artist's model has led me into an exploration of the relationship between artist and model, objectifier and objectified; I am both, and struggle to meld the two and present the image of my body in a way that does not invite the consuming gaze or that pretends to invite it only to throw it back at the viewer. In my most recent print works, the figure is life sized and confronts the viewer in endless multiples. Textile patterns stretch across parts of the skin like tattoos. Colours dance on the surface of and recede into the depths of the body, implying violence in streaks and slashes of red across torso or thigh, or in blackness engulfing a foot, a hand, a face. Lines of machine stitching cut across the paper, slicing the figure into pieces and holding it together. Like a scrap quilt or a rag rug, the body is torn to bits and then made whole again, stronger.