A ribbon is a line, is a seam, is a silhouette.
A bow is an ‘X,’ is a cross-stitch, is a signature.
A curtain is a cloak, is a blouse, is a veil.

My practice is a form of way-finding, mapping, and place-making, noting a street giveaway now broken and left for trash, a popular contemporary lace curtain fabric spotted again, or a dropped braid of hay as a synchronistic sign along the way.

A window serves as a threshold between exterior and interior, visible and invisible, public and private, known and unknown. I cut images piercing the barrier, peeling back the membrane from one realm to another, making the image three-dimensional. Photographs toggle between 2-D and 3-D by humble means in the age of CG and virtual reality. I am interested in transgressing the printed image itself and the frame within the frame.

The hand-stitched and drawn patterns come from folk embroidery and printed textiles collected while working with traditional embroiderers in Eastern and Southern Europe and researching textiles in The Netherlands. A poppy from a Ukrainian scarf, a 1700s lace collar, the zigzag line of a pleated apron, and the sweeping fringe in a Coromandel Coast chintz imported by The Dutch East India Company create a conversation, map a new path, and reveal an image within the image. With these references I explore parallels between window dressing and dressing the body.

The flat plane of the sidewalk also becomes a wall, similar to the windows. When I look down at the ground I feel the same desire to peer around the curtain, under the bricks, reminded of the bits of broken ceramics, glass, coins, jewelry, and more recently plastic, preserved through the years by the swamp on which Amsterdam was built. The street, a patchwork of bricks and cement tiles, becomes a boundary to another space and time.

General Statement

A few years ago while traveling in The Netherlands, someone asked me, “Why do you like old things?”

I am drawn to handmade objects with a history, and textiles in particular, for the intimate roles they play in our lives, as markers of identity and the passage of time. We wear fabric on the body and pull it open and closed each day in the window. We give it shape and living with it shapes us. In the age of globalization, fast fashion, over-production, and information-saturation I want to honor, preserve, and elaborate upon the disappearing tradition of embroidery, the slow, meditative practice of handwork, and folk traditions. In a dialectical exploration, I use traditional and synthetic sewing materials to create a conversation between the public and private, hidden and revealed, remembered and forgotten, rural and urban, historical and contemporary.

In my embroidered works, I distill patterns to their contours: outlines of memory, heritage, identity, and culture. I am interested in junctions– where cultures, symbols, forms, and past and present meet– and the aesthetics of the everyday. My imagery draws from decorative art traditions and cultural emblems of Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine where I have worked with embroiderers, as well as a personal vocabulary from my life in The Netherlands.