The history of patchwork, and fashioning totems from detritus, has been explored extensively, yet there is renewed examination of ‘women’s work’ and textiles as fine art, not craft. The techniques I use are timeless, and I push them to extremes, forging traditional handicrafts into modern art, while celebrating the familiar trope of women’s unappreciated hours of repetitive labor.

Methodically stitching hand-painted paper quills to ribbons, joining them to create a new kind of painting, I get lost in reveries, simultaneously calm and frightening.

Paper quilling descends from medieval reliquary objects and Victorian tea caddies, but my version of them is not uniform, monochrome, or glued onto a substructure. I sew everything together because I love the drawn line created by the stitches as much as the ritual assembling of thousands of bits of colorful, coiled paper. Just as light changes throughout the day, my paintings change depending on your viewing angle.

The “ribbon paintings”, created since the COVID lockdown, are fraught with grief for a world lost, a mother gone. As I obsessively coiled painted papers and sewed, was I making a shroud, a flag, or a hair shirt? The ribbons themselves connote so many moments from Maypole celebrations to the rending of funeral rosettes, and call to mind little girls, fashion, and the feminine mystique. They are signifiers of many things and have been for centuries, sometimes worn only by royalty, now colorfully adopted by umpteen causes.

Certain elemental facts in my work have not changed --- the innate beauty masking difficult truths, the allusions to childhood and Froebel’s lessons, the pushmi-pullyu ambivalence of art v. craft, the importance of color as a beacon of thoughts and feelings. “In two straight lines in rain or shine - The smallest one was Madeline, “wrote Ludwig Bemelmans, giving voice to my childhood and now reappearing in my new striped ribbon paintings, trying to overcome the present.