Fiber Art and Sculpture

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​My discovery in creating fiber art and sculpture was liberating in the study and use of an infinite range of materials, and potential in techniques and design. Initially, my attraction to fiber art began with its tactile experience; the sensory process of feeling and working with the materials. Visual patterns, the awareness of using negative and positive spaces, are a part of the creative process.  The process becomes meditative. It is grounded in a sense of mood, spirit and contemplation. Similar to my painting process, it builds upon itself and is a mystery until complete.

​​From the primal sense of touch, a sense that is so essential in human development, there seems to be a natural process that unfolds from working with the materials. It goes far back in human (and animal) experience, an archeological value -- stones and sticks for tools, plant fiber for shelter and vessels, scribbles from a charcoal twig, tree branches stripped for poles used as weapons and staffs for rituals. From the softness of wool roving and yarn, toughness of jute and raffia, wire and twine; working through hands and fingers, there seems to be a universal need to manipulate, stretch and pull, tie and wrap, sew and pierce, connecting these materials into another form beyond utility.
There is also the concept of the use of recycled materials; the up-cycling of used and discarded objects that are then transformed into art by an artist’s vision of possibilities. The material’s history changes from its original utilitarian purpose and is reborn into a new life in art.  Found objects can be a rusty wire, shards of a broken tea cup, an old wood spool, a lacy handkerchief from generations past, discarded plastic bottles, which are then creatively manipulated into art forms.
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When incorporating used materials and older objects -- some from my own ancestry -- I often create in a mood of silent contemplation of its history, where it came from, what it perhaps witnessed. Similar to that personal spiritual space of standing before an altar, a pilgrimage of sort, of honoring generations past; accessing insights into objects carefully made, then passed down through many hands and many years, sometimes generations. It reflects the impermanence and the preciousness of life, our time passing.

See related section on wabi sabi.