Facets, Veins, and Portals
Facets, Veins, and Portals
The intense desert summer used to be more predictable. There were approximately two weeks each June without any perceptible moisture. The air was so hot, so dry, so drenched with intense sunlight that, in order to see color, I would close my eyes.
This body of work began there. In that intense space, over a period of three to four summers, I took canvas and thin papers, staining them in a rusted wheelbarrow. The iron, coffee and/or tea, water, sun, dry air, extreme heat, mesquite leaves, palo verde flowers, and whatever else blew in, created a saturation of form unachievable at any other time. The already delicate papers were softened to almost dissolution then reintegrated in the heat of the sun. I called them my pre-monsoon fibers. Each year, I waited for that precious window, making as many pieces as I could before the moisture rolled in.
This began as a need to experientially create something alchemic with the combination of fiery heat, searing sunlight, brittle dryness, and the limits of time before monsoon rains brought moisture to the air. All elements; air, fire, water, earth, and spirit. For me, everything is an experiment, an opportunity, and an exploration—a process of sensory learning. The mystery and uncertainty is what continually brings me back to object making. The elements are truly integral and present, not simply resting on the surface.
In the winter of 2018, I was looking at a slab of chrysocolla, formed by pressure, time, and many elements coming together. The saturated blue color, the iron vein and translucent quartz felt mysterious and beautiful. Inspired, using torn, stained canvas from previous summers, I set about stitching, piecing together in order to create something wholly new from all of the fragments—a recreating, reordering—traversing timelines of memory embedded in every fiber. Like quilt blocks or agricultural fields seen from the sky, yet more abstract, more intimately reverent.
This body of work is a tactile reminder of what once was while at the same time the pieces are portals to new possibility, an opportunity to look between the fibers, between the torn edges, between stitches, between timelines, and exist, however briefly, in the space within space, where anything can be made new.
This year, I picked up the canvas and thread again, following impulse, infusing it with natural mineral pigments (turquoise and rhyolite, tea and coffee), and began infusing this series with more of the eden energies, the new light rising above that which has been built before. As much crumbles and disintegrates, the dawn is also present. When with the first light of early dawn, all expands and radiates inside. Each morning, each breath—anew.