Artist Statement
We live with intertwined ecological and health crises— from fires, sea level rise, severe storms, and toxic air, to extinctions, lost homes, cancers, and more. In response, I create weavings and sculptures that trace the relationships connecting these crises: between climate and sense of place; between extraction and illness; between personal and communal loss; and between corporeal and ecological bodies.
In the “Datascapes” project, I draw on weaving’s histories and mythologies as a subversive language for women and other marginalized people to create what I think of as a feminist, material archive of climate knowledge and care. The works in this archive merge practices of record keeping with practices of grieving and merge expressions of scientific research with expressions of lived experience. I transform climate data into abstracted landscapes and waterscapes, materializing the data as weaving and coiled sculpture, using plant-derived fibers and dyes and petrochemical-derived medical tubing and fishing line. These works are not data visualizations. Rather, I use the data as a scaffold, choosing materials, patterns, and colors to evoke places and add the social-political dimensions of the climate crisis back into the story the data tells. Data condenses vast amounts of labor, time, and knowledge into a quickly digestible form. But in the selection of what is communicated, much is stripped away. Weaving’s mathematical patterning lends itself to data translation, while weaving’s embodied and relational qualities offer a counterweight to data’s limitations. Weaving the data, I reinsert some of the time, labor, grief, place, care, embodied experience, and social relations that have been obscured.
In my most recent work, I interweave petrochemical- and plant-derived materials, data, and landscape imagery as I grapple with the interdependence of ecological and human health and the harmful effects of ongoing fossil fuel extraction. These works examine connections between the life-sustaining circulatory systems that are both internal and external to the human body—from lungs and arteries to forests and watersheds. In the Jacquard-woven series “Memories of Future Fires,” for example, I transform photos I took of trees in a fire-scarred landscape into woven, petrochemical-derived monofilament. The trees take on forms referencing hearts and lungs while the woven structures comprising each image are informed by flames and cells. These large, ghostly, porous tree bodies hang in space casting patterned shadows as light filters through them. Building on this arboreal research, I am now photographing tree species critically-endangered by climate crisis which I will later weave into forms that reference human anatomy.
In a parallel project in-progress I employ textile strategies of pattern, repetition, and accumulation to transform expired plastic medical waste into sculptures that grapple with the buildup of harmful plastics in our bodies and ecosystems. Items intended to move oxygen, blood, and fluids through the body take on forms referencing landscapes. This includes coiling thousands of tourniquets into forms evocative of tree rings; weaving oxygen tubing into works exploring toxic air; and using medical tubes for fluid delivery as the scaffolding for coiled, color-coded watershed climate data.