Artist's Statement

The Patterns Project

This group of mixed media work, using paint, collage, and a great variety of other materials began with experiments in the evocative possibilities of clothing pattern pieces, and has developed into an ongoing collaboration with poet Jackie Bartley of Michigan.

These pieces have both personal and general significance for me and utilize images, objects, and ideas which have intrigued, or I might even say haunted, me over the years. Sewing was so much a part of the lives of women in my family, especially my mother, that it was simply part of the domestic landscape. But "patterns" in a larger sense began years ago to interest me greatly: that is, the shapes of things, and the replication of those shapes in both a literal (visual) and a psychological fashion.

The power of shape and form is of great fascination to me, as is the shifting meaning of things depending on their context. And, as the two-dimensional shapes of pattern pieces represent the three-dimensional form of the body, such objects as saddles, masks, armor, tools, and, of course, clothing, all represent, protect, cover or in other ways have intimate contact with our human selves. And in the largest sense of all, our lives are spent in an endless search for pattern and meaning.

This work brings together disparate and often random thoughts and objects in a personal and, I hope, sometimes surprising iconography.