THE SHORT VERSION
I have been weaving for 25 years on a wide variety of looms, including some of my own invention.
The TC2 entered my life in the spring of 2013 when I was a grad student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Since graduating in 2014, I have served as a Fulbright Scholar at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, France; acted as the Fountainhead Fellow of Craft at VCU in Richmond, VA, where I taught the weaving curriculum; and returned as an adjunct lecturer to teach digital and floor loom courses at SAIC. I have presented lectures as a visiting artist at institutions across the US, and in Canada and France, and I have traveled to both coasts and to Iceland to weave on my dream loom, the TC2.
THE LONGER VERSION
I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, MI, a conservative, upper-middle class suburb north of Detroit, and learned to weave as a 15-year-old at Cranbrook Schools. The loom room was my “normal”; I didn’t think too much about other kids’ experiences in the world. Weaving offered me access to a sensual and embodied mathematics. The process was rhythmic, predictable, and incremental and offered me a sense of stability that my home lacked.
In 2002-03 right after college, I spent a year in the Volta Region of Ghana, learning to weave kente cloth from “Bobbo” Ahiagble and Kwami Agbemehia. I spent this year unlearning many of my assumptions around weaving: as white, middle-class, women’s work; as either a hobby or a large-scale industry; as reducible to the pages of an academic textbook.
I continued to travel and weave, spending 6 months in Varanasi, India, in 2007-08 where I studied with Sushma Singh, learning the intricacies of figurative brocade on mechanical Jacquard looms. Two years later, as the program coordinator with a Portland Oregon-based nonprofit, Zimbabwe Artists Project (ZAP), I traveled to Zimbabwe to meet and facilitate workshops with artists who worked in a variety of fiber processes in rural Eastern Zimbabwe.
In 2012, largely inspired over many years by exceptional speakers and exhibitions brought to town by Namita Gupta Wiggers and her team at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, I applied to and entered the MFA program in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Surely I appeared calm and collected in the program, while swimming in all of the too-common fears: feeling like an imposter, like I didn’t know what I was doing, all the while accruing debt and clinging to black-and-white because color was too overwhelming! Grad school undid me, and it was two years after my graduation I began to re-coalesce. I learned to call myself an artist (and earned institutional affirmation to this title – not necessary!), and began to relearn pleasure in art and in making as I untethered my self worth from my successes and failures. As “artist” is a piece of my identity, and I want my identity and politics to show up in what I make, constructing these boundaries will be a life-long undertaking.
I moved to Minneapolis at the very end of 2016, and have slowly and steadily put roots down. I teach classes through the Weavers Guild of MN; bike year round; forage for foods and for dye materials; write love letters; and continue a long-distance but highly enthusiastic, collaborative flailing through fibre mathematics with Kate O’Brien. I am constantly beginning, and endlessly grateful to the amazing communities I am a part of here, and the soulmates I’ve found at craft camp and arts residencies along my way.
