How does your city influence your work?
The obvious answer is through the topography of the city. There are hills everywhere! In fact, I live on one of the city's smaller hills. How I interact with the hills is what is important to me. The hills, and how I feel, often influence how I navigate my way through San Francisco. For example, if I feel tired on my way home from my studio I will often take a route home on my bicycle that takes me a few blocks out of the way. Or maybe I'll walk up the steepest pitch. There is a self assessment that occurs every time that I ride my bike in SF.
How does this relate to the work you are doing?
This translates to the work I am doing through the constant decision making process. I make most decisions about topography in my work based on what is happening in the moment. Perhaps a dart occurs because of what I am listening to on the radio-a song, Bob Garfield's voice, or "As It Happens". This is similar to the example I gave about route selection on the bike. The moment and context drives my decision making. How large a "hill" becomes is based on how it relates to its surroundings and how I feel. When to create volume in my work is dependent on emotion and context.
What materials do you use? Why?
I use almost exclusively used materials. Initially because it was free and bountiful. Now, because I am committed to diverting textiles that would most certainly be sitting in a landfill and transforming them into something beautiful. The first used materials that I worked with were truck inner tubes that I would gather from the trash of a tire repair shop in North Berkeley. I cut, and hand sewed, the rubber from the inner tubes into small wallets. Later, I added windows to the wallets that contained landscape photos I took with my Polaroid Land Camera or I'd adorn the wallets with cartoonish marker drawings. The last ten years of my life, my source materials have been remnants, sample fabric, discards, and now donations from the folks at T2.
Please explain your obsession with the band Blue Sky Black Death.
Is this a real question?
Yes, it is.
If you don't mind, I agreed to this interview because I thought I'd have an opportunity to talk about my work. I would prefer to talk about my art, not that of others. I sometimes listen to this band while I sew. "Glaciers" is the soundtrack to my tapestries.
Ok. If you were to show me two places in San Francisco, where would we go?
We'd ride bikes over to Scrap, then go over to Herons' Head park, and ride out to the end of the jetty. The view of the bay is amazing out there.
Let's go!!
Alright.