I work across the boundaries of drawing, printmaking and textiles, making collages and soft sculptures to explore the relationship between decoration and function. I draw from the languages of quiltmaking, geometric abstraction, and the 1970’s Pattern and Decoration movement to create works that are an unrestrained layering of pattern on pattern.
I delight in the ornamental. I am unabashedly maximalist. We’re in an era of blur: boundaries between work and home have collapsed, domesticity fractured. I find inspiration in cakepans, in frosting, in wallpaper, in tablecloths, in kids’ art supplies, in endless clutter. I want to render it all neon, so it’s almost hard to look at, and fit everything onto one page.
Working modularly, on easily portable surfaces, I draw small geometric works and patterns that become matrices for prints. I flip and shift them, tiling, cutting up, reconfiguring, collaging and sewing them into larger pieces. The works, reminiscent of quilts, embody the pleasures of color, pattern, and craft.
Most of my work involves risograph, a process that is a sort of cross between a screenprint and an offset lithograph all housed within a xerox-like machine. Now outdated technology, risograph duplicators were once widely used in schools and church presses. I use mechanical processes like this to translate handmade processes, working back and forth until the distinction is blurred. I enjoy the tension between the handmade and the machine-made, and the moments of glitch.