MY STORY

I originate from a long line of artists: painters, weavers, basket makers and textile artists. I spent many childhood hours climbing underneath my mom’s looms.  I would daydream from underneath the looms, through the crisscrossed color and textures. My matrilineal grandmother kept a stash of scrap fabrics and found objects, with which she was always encouraging me to experiment, to learn from failures, and most importantly, to create. Whether working with wood, paint or textiles, the creative process feels genuine and true.

My building work merges my passion for functional design, love for creative problem solving, and desire to work with my hands. I build on a scale that feels connected to nature and to the artistic process. I am devoted to minimal waste design, maximizing utility and efficiency, and keeping the work consistent with the landscape. The outcome is unique functional structures with an artist’s touch.

My artwork is an outward expression of the way I experience color, texture, and place. I am drawn to quiet subtleties and dramatic extremes which I depict with combinations of bold colors and fine lines. The landscapes reflect the rhythm of my life, and the inspiration I draw from nature. The color study paintings are a way that I play with ideas, with color relationships, and with design. They inspire my quilts, and vice versa.

My quilts tell the stories of my life. They are comprised mostly of my family’s outgrown clothing. There are threads of my husband’s shirt from the day he and I met woven throughout many of my quilts. The shirt was an old long sleeved purple t-shirt which apparently made an impression. There are buttons, pockets, thread bare knees, all as memory keepers, transformed into keepsakes intended to be used for warmth and comfort. My quilts are unconventional, with perfectly imperfect lines and improvisational mending. It is that imperfection that appeals to me, that gives the piece life and shows the artisan handwork. I experiment with quilts as ways to keep records, from a Minneapolis Map Quilt, designed to mark this time and place in our lives, complete with neighborhoods, parks, schools and lakes demarcated, to a temperature chart quilt which outlines a year of highs and lows, each color indicating a temperature span of three degrees Fahrenheit. With recent textiles I have been playing with nuances of color and texture interactions, and how it feels to be wrapped up, made cozy and connected, with the quilts as interactive art.

I grew up in the foothills of Santa Barbara, California. I earned a B.S. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1998. I went on to work as an artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico and then in the San Francisco Bay Area for several years.  I live in Southwest Minneapolis. I have been married to my husband Andy for 24 years, and we have three awesome, smart, driven, growing-like-weeds kids, born in 2002, 2006, and 2010. As a family we jump at opportunities for backpacking adventures, being goofballs at Family Camp, biking many miles on the dirt and the city trails, skating the lakes and cheering each other on for our grand and our itty-bitty goals alike. We spend much of our free time in Northern Minnesota, on 6 acres in Ely, Minnesota.

WE DO THIS FOR FUN PODCAST: Listen here to my discussion with Jodi Gruhn and Lynn Melling about my creative process on their podcast, WE DO THIS FOR FUN.