I’ve created my most recent work by incorporating three different media—textile techniques, painting, and collage. I comb contemporary media such as staged photographs, television shows, and teen magazines for images of young females; then I pluck their images from those scenes—scenes of girls gathered on curbs or hanging together on stoops or in public bathrooms or other locations that simply terrify me for them…because I am always terrified for girls and groups of girls in today’s culture. By weaving and lacing and stitching them into wholly fabricated landscapes, I reinsert them into places I’ve worked very hard to make pleasant, comfortable, and safe. All I really know is that I am more at ease by having stitched them in place there.

I follow historical Venetian lace patterns in applying the paint; I then pivot to reassembling the cut-out images by stitching them in keeping with historical New England quilting patterns. In this way, I turn to my own family’s historical experiences and practices for girls, anchoring them into something familiar to me, a perhaps inaccurate stand-in for safety. I am marrying contemporary images of girls and adolescent females with historical-stitching practices…while also permanently insulating them into lovely, soft, colorful, and safe spaces that allow me to finally relax about them. 

I am the mother of an adolescent girl, which is perhaps at the root of all of my current angst. 

I was also once an adolescent girl, which is perhaps at the root of all my current angst. 

The resulting pieces straddle the categories of painting, installation art, and craft. They are the physical manifestations of compressed times and cultures, and, to me, they certainly represent shifts in how we view girls and adolescent females and the tensions with which they now live.

Admittedly, I must now wrestle with the result that as I have tried to save my young subjects, I have permanently preserved their girlhood and adolescence in paint and cloth and comfort.