Current Artist Statement
I am engaged in a personal industrial revolution from my home base in San Francisco. This involves two main facets: the weaving and distribution of blankets and cloth goods, and the use of any channel of communication to publicly advocate for weaving as an empowering act. I have recently woven and traded wool blankets for such necessities as canned goods, rent and wool yarn in a fine art barter project. I am currently installing small looms to be used by 4-10 year olds at the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose. My key point of exploration is the way that the fine art context can offer a direct experience of participation in an alternative economic or production model: exchange can be understood as the material expression of relationships, and manufacture of goods can be enjoyed as play. This is the new social order I envision, and these are the paths I promote. i have a Bachelor's Degree from SF State in Industrial Design, and a Master's Degree in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts.
Grad School Artist Statement
As a weaver my primary methodology is to make connections, to manipulate elements and produce structure and pattern, which embody meaning. In my studio practice this entails gathering yarns and using the loom to organize them into cloth. My social practice involves engaging with groups and individuals and encouraging them to tap into their own productive capacities; the potential that lies within each of us to create objects which function in a real, physical sense, and also semiotically: these things and the processes used to produce them can operate as political and aesthetic statements. This potential is not relegated to the textile field alone, but I use cloth and cloth production as a point of entry for this dialogue because no other human artifact has its quotidian ubiquity and no other technique has its sensuous appeal.
The overarching goal of my artistic project is to present productive labor as an engaging, satisfying endeavor, whose products could be shared freely within a community to serve the needs of all of its members. I advocate for this possibility through the presentation of situations in which participants experience an instance of this type of exchange. What I am proposing is a truly free market, a real regaining of the means of production and a radical shift in the modes of exchange and distribution of these goods.