Skyhull & Lumenpear

( 2015-19 )

I had recently moved to Orcas Island and built a little studio with a high ceiling. In the upper space I’d spontaneously hung a model wooden rowboat simply because there’s so much about a boat floating in Sky that I find intriguing and delightful. When the elements of a new exploration started to gather, that inspiration floating above was like hanging fruit, ripe for plucking.

These works evolved out of a decade and a half of exploration in volume, organic line and light. They were made with copper armatures, my vividly-hued handmade flax fiber paper, beeswax, resins, and light.  

With the Skyhull and Lumenpear series, I was thinking of the form that holds and shapes the inner light as a contoured, translucent landscape. And the landscape of this boat or pear being shared with some unlikely other thing.  

Across numerous series, my work work has comprised blends of seemingly disparate things. I feel at home in the ephemeral, ambiguous presence of the meld between.

Here, the various colors of the surface of a boat might also suggest a boat-shaped flower or a garden. Or the colors of the form of a pear might reveal as well a river or snail. 

I was drawn to the rarefied depth of a surface that has light reflecting from it externally, while a different quality of light glows through from an obscured inner side.

This pair of series explored simultaneous reflection and refraction in a potently colored, three-layer translucent fiber skin. Interior and exterior meeting within the surface, lending it in this way, too, the subtle intimacy of a landscape held between.