Connecting the Universal Thread
Multidisciplinary wall hangings, fibers, and installation-style work has had a hold on my attention for as long as I can remember. The concept of many small pieces coming together to form a whole is a satisfying thing in and of itself, no matter the materials, shapes, colors, and textures. This obsession with larger works made from miniature pieces rang true even during my university days, as I arranged intricately painted ceramic tiles in a pattern along a wall for my senior gallery show. Or how I carved a series of river platters where the designs blended from one to the next. To this day, anyone who visits my studio sees the copious piles of small ceramic pieces just waiting for their turn to tie into another.
The realization of connectivity to everything around us is what inspires these pieces. Creating a visual statement of many pieces forming a unified piece is a satisfying sight. At our roots, we are connected to everything, strung together by a universal thread. In dedication to this understanding, I seek to use various materials and create semblances of this connection.
To join these natural components together— wood, clay, and fiber— is a practice of patience and reverence, for I know my ancestors before me used these same materials. To create with earthen objects is an homage to them and the callouses they earned from working with their hands. What an honor, joy, and responsibility it is to carry these practices through in whatever ways we are able.
This wall hanging is the first of many that explores these ideas of connection, homage, landscape, and sonder*. It brings to life the idea of individuals coming together and connecting for a world and a history bigger than themselves.
Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
-The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
