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PoppiesSize: 29" h x 37" w
Price: Sold
I love poppies and wanted to immortalize them because their short bloom makes their presence so fleeting. But the way poppies are fine and graceful, with their rice-paper petals and brilliant color, is in contradiction to their World War I symbolism of battlefield burials. They’re delicate and flirty, but also earnest and sturdy and purposeful. The natural world is fabulous at creating things that hold a balance between two contradictory qualities.
The original is sold, but you can purchase a signed, limited edition giclée print of this piece, produced on archival paper with archival inks. $175 plus $20 shipping and handling.
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Sliding Gear Transmission (3 Red Squares)Size: 8" h x 8" w
Price: $100
This piece is available at the La Posada Hotel gift shop, in Winslow, Arizona.
My grandfather's 1918 auto repair manual contains some beautiful diagrams of combustion engines and other parts of automobiles. I've transferred one of those images onto this piece. When I was ten I wanted to be an auto mechanic.
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Springs RestorationSize: 16" h x 16" w
Price: Sold
I've worked with the Diablo Trust for several years. Last year for the exhibit, Reflections on the Land, I stitched this piece, starting with white cloth, then dyeing, printing on the fabric from photos I'd taken during a site visit, and yards and yards of embroidery floss. The long vertical lines, visible if you look closely, are stitches. -
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Sewing LessonsSize: 8" h x 8" w
Price: Sold
I have a Free brand treadle sewing machine from the early 1900s. (Yes, it still works, and no, I don't use it too much these days.) It came with the manual, which is what I used to print on this piece. The first instruction is very stern: Do Not Make Unnecessary Adjustments. The photo of the little girls was taken by Eulalia "Sister" Bourne, who used to teach around that same time at a ranch school in southern Arizona. -
Press OnSize: 8" h x 8" w
Price: $100
This piece is available at the La Posada Hotel gift shop, in Winslow, Arizona.
An American Beauty iron – with no working thermostat – was a great find at a thrift store in Cottonwood many years ago. It has a red lucite handle and serves as a beautiful sculptural object. Since I spend so much time with my irons, I've grown quite attached to the form. Many of my recent small works use the iron as an icon, a tribute to a time when we still ironed.
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Spotless IVSize: 16" h x 22" w
Price: Sold
Okay, I admit it. I love to vacuum. It's one of the most satifying things to do when I need to think. It's the noise, the useful way it shuts out the world, the gratifyingly clean floor. That and the fact that a vacuum cleaner has this great shape that looks like a niche where an icon might reside. It's just divine.
The original is sold, but you can purchase a signed, limited edition giclée print of this piece, produced on archival paper with archival inks. The print is 17" x 22", and the image area is 19-3/4"h x 14-1/2"w. $175 plus $20 shipping and handling.
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I'll Call YouSize: 16" h x 22" w
Price: Sold
My aunt Pat worked for the phone company when I was little. I loved going to her house because she had toy phones that were pretty pastel colors. My recollection is that she had a phone that wasn't black, probably the first one I'd ever seen. I wanted to pay homage to the beautiful shapes of those early phones that have mostly gone away. The backdrop reminds me of those tablecloths that my mom used to have.
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Tea Ceremony IIISize: 12" h x 12" w
Price: $350
After reading Andrew Juniper's bookWabi Sabi* , I was thinking about tea and transience. This piece includes reclaimed fabric and a tourist scarf from London, which I found interesting, considering the transient aspect of travel and souvenirs.
* Wabi Sabi describes a traditional Japanese aesthetic sensitibility based on an appreciation of the transient beauty of the physical world.
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HumSize: 20" h x 53" w
Priceless
The second piece in this series delves more deeply into our relationship with nature. (The first piece in the series is Buzz, created in 2005.) For the central image, I used the back of a very tattered prayer flag. I printed the lotus blossom image on that fragment to symbolize our divine nature, our deep connection to the natural world, and to highlight the beauty of decay. In this piece, the bees are leaving, and scarab beetles replace them.
Win this piece! This artwork was donated to Flagstaff Cultural Partners, which is selling raffle tickets. Tickets are $20 each or $50 for three tickets, and can be purchased through Flagstaff Cultural Partners. Call 928-779-2300 for details about this. All proceeds benefit Flagstaff Cultural Partners, the local arts agency for Flagstaff. -
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Bee EssenceSize: 10" h x 9" w
Sold
Once upon a time, near San Felipe (on the Baja peninsula, in Mexico), I found a bottle that had this shape. I was having a day full of round things, and now I remember that shape and think of that day. What would it contain, except honey?
Hand stitched with embroidery floss, a meditation on the power of bees. -
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BuzzSize: 20.5" h x 55" w
Price: $3600
This piece is available at the La Posada Hotel gift shop, in Winslow, Arizona.
This stitched textile collage maps the uneasy relationship humans have with bees, and metaphorically, with the rest of nature. On one hand, our entire agricultural system breaks down when bees as pollinators are excluded. Though lesser substitutes are available, honey and beeswax are prized products. On the other hand, we keep bees at arms length, knowing the power of their sting. We need bees (and nature), but we want some control.
We are part of nature, but blindly pretend we’re not. We interject ourselves into the natural world, and disrupt the order of the earth, but nature carries on.
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Night and DaySize: 27"h x 35"h
Price: NFS
I was given a set of "charm squares" in which each square is a different fabric, and challenged to make a quilt. I wasn't particularly interested in making a whole quilt that way (and the squares were only 1-1/2" square!), so I used the "charms" to make the center section and built the rest of the piece around that. The top is the night sky, the lower part represents land in the daytime. -
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Kaleidescope PlantSize: 36"h x 35"h
Price: NFS
The 12th century mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci, is recognized for his discovery of the Fibonacci sequence, in which two numbers in the sequence add up to the next number in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on. These numbers also have a "golden ratio" property, so they can be used to draw correct single-point perspective, which is what the "tabletop" on this piece signifies. -
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Bright StarsSize: 48"h x 25"h
Price: NFS
I became interested in tesselations from reading Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach. The center of this piece has a quilting pattern that is a parquet deformation: one line "moves" in each row, and the shapes are transformed from equilateral triangles (at the bottom of the piece) to diamonds (at the top.) The stars are hand-pieced and inset into the edges of the center field of black, and the piece is hand-quilted. -
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Amish BulltownSize: 80"h x 80"h
Price: NFS
This was one of my very early quilts. It is completely hand-pieced and hand-quilted. Even the binding was sewn on my hand. I started it when we lived in Sharontown, Iowa (with a Kalona ZIP code, though), and had a lot of Amish neighbors. Our closest neighbors babysat for our older son, and the wife taught me how to make an Amish bonnet in the regional style, with buckram and black cotton cloth.
