Preview
Creation Date
2016
Description
Materials: Cotton Fabric and Thread
Project Advisor: Benjamin D. Rinehart
Year of Graduation: 2016
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
COinS
Artist Statement
I’m particularly interested in the relationship between fine art and craft. I have a strong background in art history, as I am studying to be an art historian, and my written work focuses narrowly on material culture—objects that wouldn’t usually fit within the art historical discourse because they are separated from ‘high’ art mediums. I think this idea is particularly prevalent in my artistic work because of my interest in handicraft forms and materials. Recently my body of work has focused on two distinctly traditional feminine handicraft art forms—embroidery and quilting—and combines them with paint, a more traditional, masculine medium. The biggest aspects of these mediums that influenced me were the inherent gender biases and implications in their discussions. The art world in itself is incredibly biased and skewed towards white male participants, and traditionally, high art was reserved for the upper class elite, and artistic genius was reserved as a trait specifically of men. In my work I am interested in pushing this notion, and exploring how far I can merge traditional handicraft forms with high art and bend the gendered associations in high art.
While my background is in painting, I have recently looked into the incorporation of embroidery as an artistic medium. I generally paint basic figures with acrylic or oil paint and then go back either using hand embroidery or a sewing machine to highlight, add depth, texture, or pattern, and to change the composition. I have recently been looking in depth at contemporary uses for embroidery—particularly into feminist embroideries and the idea of reclaiming the medium. I have always been drawn towards the use of text in my work and want to explore how text can influence a body of work both as its own entity or hidden within a larger artwork.