Art Show

On Tuesday I put up my installation at the gallery in Georgia. It's called Current.

Jack and I recently moved to Alabama, and are experiencing the South for the first time. His job takes us to a new place every few years, which is always a wonderful learning experience. As we prepared to leave our last home in Utah, I was thinking a lot about the good times we had there, and the friends we had made. I considered the things they had taught me, and how they had influenced my life. I thought about how those people and those experiences have become a part of me. Now I take those things with me, wherever I go.

This piece, Current, is about the people and places that flow into our lives, and influence how we develop. I started with 135 pieces of fabric, identical in size and shape. I hand-dyed each piece, then stitched the pieces together to form something that would fill the gallery. You can walk into the piece, so it surrounds you.

I started with identical pieces of fabric because the individual pieces can be read as moments in time, or specific people and experiences that have left their mark. I applied the dye to the fabric in different ways, sometimes allowing the dye from one piece to seep onto the fabric of another piece. I also soaked some pieces in one vat of dye, and then moved it into another vat to see how the colors would blend and change one another.

When I first visited this gallery I noted the wonderful length of the space, and I could immediately envision a river running through the space. Not the curvaceous, looping rivers of Andy Goldsworthy, but the long, wide rivers that I’ve seen here in the South, since moving here. And the colors of jade and turquoise, those came from a recent trip that we took to the Caribbean, where I saw the most incredible colors of water!