Balancing tradition and innovation I create sculptures with elaborate layers of stitch, pattern and meaning using materials from soft domestic to rigid ceramic. My recent work intertwines familial connections and the inheritance of objects, skills and ideas passed through generations. Grandmother’s quilts, wedding dresses, drapes, plaid shirts, furry remnants from toys, upholstery, threads from unfinished needlework, and family photos are manipulated with crochet, weaving, wrapping and embroidery. I’ve recently introduced clay commingling rigid forms with fibers to create vessels that don’t hold water but instead contain stories embodying domestic life as an inquiry and form of self-discovery.  

The sculpture A Figment Of is a wrapped wire fabrication about family and tradition as if a product of mental invention, a fantastic notion, an imagined story. Suspended in air it references the body indicating a neural network or brain. There is a complicated nostalgia with layers of vintage photography, fiber manipulation and domestic objects arranged to limit visibility and control the level of exposure. The softness of the wound cotton reads as a gentle, warm, encompassing recollection that triggers the imagination and draws you in. Once close, the oddly cropped images positioned in disoriented proximities to each other become more apparent and suggest an unsettling narrative about relationships. The red center, a domestic heirloom, acts as the heart of this framework with tightly wound threads that bind the subjects together. Pom poms from bedroom curtains, lace doilies, woven details and stuffed pillows add an ephemeral poignancy. Structured improvisationally it is iterative, growing and growing without knowing where it’s going, much like life itself. An extension of this work is Josephine and Elda. Ceramic vessels stitched with autobiographical fibers as photographic portraits. Something is a little off. The holes are in mismatched places. They reveal some of the interior but not much. Josephine is my great grandmother, an immigrant seamstress whose martyrlike stature in the family represented all that was amiss for women in the mid 20th century. Elda is her daughter and, as I recall, a beloved and defiant character in her family dynamic. All three pieces are my attempt to stitch together what is out of my control. Memory is fleeting, we are products of who came before us and we inherit from previous generations. Traumas, celebrations, politics, and family behaviors are brought forward and captured into our physiologies and souls. J.C.