Artist Statement
Fabric is my life. I first discovered the delights of the textile medium when I started sewing outfits as part of the 4-H sewing club in my hometown near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During my freshman year of high school, I saw a presentation given by a local artist who used various fabrics to make 2-dimensional fine art pictures. The process looked like fun, so I decided to try it. It was this artistic experiment that made me fall in love with fabric. Over the next eight years, I improved and perfected my technique. As far as I know, there is no other artist in the world that does what I do.
So what exactly DO I do? The process of creating a finished piece involves a number of steps. I start off with a line drawing in which I have broken each object down into separate sections. Each section will later correspond to a piece of fabric. For example, to show a sphere is round, I would separate it into three different sections: the highlight, the mid-tone, and the shadow.
Next, I enlarge the drawing to the appropriate size, which becomes my template, and trace each section on to a heat-sensitive fabric glue paper. Each section is assigned a number, which I record on both the template and the tracing. This is often the most complicated step, for the number of individual pieces in each picture often climbs into the hundreds. The vast majority of my works contain 100-300 pieces, but a few of them have as many as 800.
After tracing and numbering the sections, I iron the traced pieces down on to the appropriate fabrics and start cutting. Every section must be individually cut out before beginning the final step.
The last step of the process is by far the most rewarding. Up to this point, I have had to imagine what the finished picture is going to look like. At this point, however, everything quite literally falls into place. I use the template to assemble each and every individual piece. The numbers I assigned earlier to each section now tell me exactly where that particular section is supposed to go. All I do is match the number on the piece to the number on the template.
On May 7, 2010 I graduated from the Ringling College of Art and Design. Ironically, I first went to Ringling because I wanted to learn how to paint. I had been working with fabric for four years by then, but I wanted to learn other mediums. For two years I stayed away from fabric during the school year, only working on new projects in my free time over the summer. In my junior year, however, my professors discovered the work I was doing outside of school and strongly encouraged me to get back into working with fabric full time. I am very glad they did so, and my work overall has benefited greatly from feedback regarding value, color, and other compositional changes. Yet no one has ever been able to help me with the intricacies of my technique, because no one else knows how to do what I do.
However, I now understand that this is a good thing. My work is one-of-a-kind. Its uniqueness draws people in, and will be a very marketable quality. I see a bright future ahead of me!