Artist's Statement

My practice begins with repurposed bedsheets and t-shirts — fabrics carrying traces of daily life. Building on rag paper history and the women's labor that prepared used cloth for paper mills, I gather, sort, tear, and pulp textiles. I transform materials closest to bodies into hand-formed paper. My innovations in shape, thickness, edges, shadows, and sustainable color foreground overlooked supports that carry us through vulnerable experiences.

The catalyst was personal: losing my father in 2007 drew me toward texture and material transformation; having a child in 2019 reawakened my relationship to color and fabric. Most color comes directly from original fabrics, pulped and mixed without dyes. I build wet-into-wet to form low-relief surfaces with expanding ellipses. Watercolor washes accentuate texture. Torn fabric and impressions left by removed material interrupt forms with evidence of both rupture and repair, presence and absence.

Grief and caretaking drew me toward the night sky, toward questions of deep time, cycles, and scale. That pull brought me into conversation with astronomers who are also mothers, contemporary and historical. Their unacknowledged labor mirrors the women who prepared rag for paper mills: essential, generative, rarely centered. My recent work combines hand-formed paper with recorded conversations with Dr. Isabel Hawkins and Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, whose perspectives illuminate parallels between personal and cosmic time — orbits, cycles, gravity — and honor the layers of care that make human life, art, and discovery possible.