the space between | 2026
My improvisational works of felt and paper chart the process of their own coming into being, integrating and harmonizing discontinuities, chance juxtapositions, and contradiction in formally precise constellations with the quality of inevitability. The various elements and their relationships constitute a living language.
Felt is the first textile. Non-woven, basic, a matted, weighty tangle of animal fur with contradictory qualities, felt provides resistance and suggests the irrational. I cut out and transplant primarily letters, letter-derived, and pictogram-like shapes into a soft-to-the-touch felt ground thus activated. Shapes are inlaid (and stitched) into position requiring exactness. The spiraling tension of the hand stitching causes stress on both sides of the seam, resulting in unpredictable dimensional flare-ups that bring the work into life and are challenging to manage and integrate. The attempted regularity of the stitching is in opposition to the compressed chaos that is felt. Irregular edges and openings within forms activate and incorporate actual surrounding space. Felt's matte tactility, the subtle luster of silk thread, and the often saturated range of color and its interactions provide intensity, richness, and additional complexity, while the cutting out and stitching together suggests prior history, repair, and renewal.
I make works on-and-with handmade paper alongside my felt work. They are combinations of pencil drawing and writing, gouache painting, cut-and-pasted paper, stitched thread, and actual toothpicks, wooden ice cream spoons, popsicle sticks, band-aids. As with the felt work, shapes are cut-out, inlaid, though held in position with glued strips rather than stitching. Similarly too, the sheets of handmade papers become activated and react unpredictably to my interventions, wrinkling and buckling with the application of paint and glue.
With both felt and paper, I am after realness, while exploring ways that a work can be at once coherent and inchoate, exude physical presence while remaining elusive.