Artist Statement with submittal to BAA, Pittsfield. April17, 2022

I have always felt a deep connection to nature and the natural world.
During the last few years I have begun to combine my love of surface texture, developed during an earlier career as a hand-weaver, with stitched marks on paper and more recently on silk and felt. These base layer materials were initially enhanced with random dying and later with photographic imagery.

During a period when far flung travel was an impossibility, travel through imaginary landscapes, using a needle to stitch a path along contours connecting mountains to coastlines, was a creative alternative. Ancient fragments of iron were discharge dyed onto felt to form the starting points for this series from 2020, of which “Felt Landscape IV” is one example.

Enforced isolation during Covid also led me to look back through the many photographs I have taken. I realized that one of my themes over the years was closeups of patterns found in nature: roc