These large textiles investigate ideas of topographies, marginal spaces, protection and documentation. When a piece of cloth is sound and intact, it creates a boundary between the inside and outside, and defines the place where these zones touch each other. But when it is worn through, those boundaries become a little less clear. Then the explored terrain has more to do with exhaustion, outsourcing, disrepair, erosion and failing.

 

I've been collecting worn and discarded cloth for several years. I'm especially attracted to material with holes worn in it – rags, used envelopes, deteriorated pieces of lace, handwritten lists, scraps of metal that emerge in parking lots as the ice melts in spring. These worn out, abraded, unwanted things are beautiful to me − they reveal an accumulation of use, of work, of neglect and time. They speak to me about my own vulnerability, my own aging, the slow and eventual breaking down of my physical body.

 

It has been enormously satisfying to convert this collection of unwanted discarded materials into works that speak honestly about the raw new terrain ahead of me.