Solo Exhibition “From the Earth”

@ Book and Puppet March 15 – June 7 2025
​Loom raising 5-8 Friday March 28
Reception 3-6 p.m. Saturday April 26
This coming week I am going to be hanging a solo exhibition” curated by Arta Brito that brings together my recent work from the past few years, the fiber, painting and ceramic. I was so happy that Arta could see the connection between growing plants to dye recycled fabric and make paints, for example, with making clay and ceramic glazes from local materials. I’m literally going to the earth for my materials, and participating in historical, even ancient forms of making. In a world that is becoming ever more virtual and artificial, I hope people can enjoy the “grounding” of this work when viewing it as much as I felt when making it.  

The fixed parts of the show will be up by March 15, available for viewing during all of Book & Puppet’s regular hours. There will be a “loom raising” event on Friday March 28, the public is invited to come and help me construct a warp-weighted loom in the gallery! I will demonstrate how I take old bed sheets, clothing etc. and turn them into cord or “t-shirt yarn” that can be used for weaving. I’m going to use the loom and naturally dyed, repurposed fiber to do a weaving on this loom over the course of the exhibition. This show will have the finished 27 foot weaving that I made on the loom I built in the East Stroudsburg University Madelon Powers Gallery for my 2021 solo exhibition there. (See photo below.)

Before I did the warp weighted loom, I used a pin loom to “sketch” in the same naturally dyed, reclaimed fibers I eventually used in the warp-weighted loom. These modules were the models for the large paintings I made-on repurposed, reclaimed fabric of course-that are also in the exhibition. Since the modules are small, they can “dance” around the exhibition space, there are two dozen of them, see if you can find them all! ​

While dyeing the fabric, I was kind of gob-smacked to learn that some of the pigments that I had been painting with for decades were originally made using leftover dye baths! I took a deep dive into making my own pigments, and paint during my residency at the NCC East 40. I did a series of imaginary landscapes on clay panels I made, where ALL of the colors were paints I had made from pigments I processed. This show will include most of these imaginary landscapes. So for example you can see weavings that include fiber dyed with madder root, and paintings that use paint made from the leftovers of the dye bath used to dye that fiber in the same show. These natural landscapes also include paints made from clay dug from the NCC East 40, and ceramic works made utilizing that same clay. The ceramic works are the most recent, except of course for the weaving that will be performed over the course of the show. ​

A through-line and progression here are the materials-from the earth-that are used in all the work.