Earlier this year, I was asked by Scott at Likewise Coffee to install a piece of art on the wall at the cafe. I decided to create a new piece, seeing the invitation as an opportunity to create something large. I think most artists can relate to the desire to make large pieces, but the hesitation to create something that will take up a lot of space in the studio without an exhibition or commission already in place. So I jumped at the opportunity.

The concept came about very intuitively. I worked with the scale and texture that I thought would compliment the space well, and materials that my hands craved to work in. The first step was to create chains out of a very delicious warm textured stoneware I had just brought into my studio. Using an extruder, I made 300 oval links. I attached them together to make five chains with 60 links in each and fired them at cone 6. Then I experimented on the wall of the studio to find the best way to attach the chains onto cotton rope. The composition came about intuitively over the course of two days. After I arranged the materials together, it just took another day to finalize and secure everything in place.

My buddy Bill Walker helped me install the piece on the cafe wall. After it was finally hung I had the space in my mind to reflect on it’s meaning/where it came out of from within me. This is often how I work. Intuition guides my process, and once the piece is finished I am able to figure out what the heck it is about. The day I installed it someone mentioned that it reminded them of a blanket and that clicked in my mind a whole train of concepts. Blanket, weighted, safety, chains, locks, secure, security blanket, transitional object….

I realized that this sculpture is emerging from this place in my life when I am working through new ways of realizing my autonomy, independence, and interdependence. After three years of major life transitions I have brand new versions of safety, comfort, home for myself. Every single one of my relationships have shifted recently, and I have a lot of new ones, even new types of relationship styles that I have never experienced before.

I titled the piece “Attachment Object”. I hope it conveys a sense of soft sturdiness. It is the balance required of love, friendship and community to be both flexible and strong, open and heavy, soft and hard. The paradox in how what is most fragile can be the most enduring.

This is just the most recent installation in Likewise Cafe’s plan to rotate a new local artist’s work on the wall quarterly. Attachment Object is for sale and available in September/October when the piece comes down. Please contact me to inquire about purchasing or commissioning a similar piece.

Newly listed for sale on the website are a selection of pieces left over from last year’s 30x30x30 Exhibition at Var Gallery in Milwaukee, WI. This collection of work was actually very personal. Some of the fabrics used were from significant places, including silk from the wedding dress I had made for myself over 15 years ago. Below is the statement I wrote for the work…

The first celebrated woman lyricist, Sappho, was regarded in ancient times as one of the world’s greatest poets. Most of her work is now lost, and the poems and songs that have survived are fragments, having been discovered on crumbling pieces of papyrus or on broken pottery unearthed in the sands of Egypt.

My personal discovery of Sappho came at a significant time last year, while going through major life transitions. I was unearthing parts of my own identity, revealed in fragments obscured by time. I was also experiencing an evolution as an artist, most recently feeling called to explore language as a new medium for myself. More significant to me than her poetry itself was the mystery of our modern experience of Sappho as an artist. The thousands of years between us and the thousands of lines of poetry lost forever form a mystique around this ancient romantic lover of women from the island of Lesbos, which makes our experience of her work spacious. The fragmented poem is whole as it exists in this present moment, but still lingering is the hum of the lines that were lost, creating magic in their absence. This collection of work attempts to speak to the way that personal narrative can take the shape of broken artifacts, the more obscured and fragmented they are, the more romantic they become.

Attachment Object

Sappho Series

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