Each stitch is a marker of time, place and experience.

Seeking Shelter is a contemporary exploration of the traditional Ngarrindjeri mats of Australia. I first encountered these mats while working on fiber sculptures for WOMADelaide in Adelaide, South Australia. The mats folded into womb-like baskets mesmerized me with the simplicity of structure, materials and use. Traditionally the women of the Ngarrindjeri, around the Murray river made the mats by gathering sedge grasses and coiling them into an eight-foot diameter mat. Folded and stitched partially they were used to carry children, scoop fish, and hold sacred objects. Enclosed completely they were used to wrap the dead. This basket structure is symbolic of the sacred fertile state out of which things come.
By recreating this style of mat with materials ranging from seagrass, bamboo, rawhide, natural fiber cords, and other skins, I will explore the potential forms available by simply folding an oval mat, contorting it’s shape and stitching sections of the woven cloth.

Eventually focusing on one material I will create a series of large-scale folded pouches/wombs and install these forms in a pristine space forming the shape a diamond on the ground as a manner to hold space for the viewers thoughts, emotions, memories and deaths - as totems. I would also like to install these sculptures in the landscape with the hopes of photographing and journaling their habitation by wildlife and their deterioration by the elements.

From String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art by Elissa Auther

A quote from Christian Berndard, page 90:

Plastic artists who resort to the use of textile clearly do so for its intrinsic qualities, be they plastic or symbolic, but they never do so in order to approach a discussion about textile nor to make experiments concerning the possibilities of this material the  central concern of their work…The textile artist, on the other hand, …generally ends up giving them the an emphasis and an aesthetic value. The plastic artist speaks about the world with the means he finds in the world and which he appropriates according to his needs, whilst the textile artist always speaks in the first instance about his medium and his works are only concerned with giving it a metaphorical sense, or at any rate, it always dominates all other concerns.