Lenten Laundry

Lenten Laundry: There is no human experience it seems that does not somehow involve the use of cloth, or weaving. In the incidental details of life lived I often locate the folds of some material always imbued with the detritus of living: the clothes on our backs and the stains and scents of where we've been, the evidence; the process of laundering that past, and the telltale byproducts of the laundering, the dryer lint, the paper accidentally wadded and washed, the spent softener sheets. Similar evidence washes up on the shores of consciousness: eggshells from a newly fledged songbird, or the bones of a songbird caught in the pellet left by the owl or the hawk. A worn out dishrag, a stained coffee filter, a tuft of cat hair -- we leave so much behind and the clues are often wrought of fibers, are organic, they continue after our use for them is exhausted, they go unnoticed in the sea of objects and ciphers. I am captivated by the intimacy of what we leave behind, by the cloth of our experiences.

Each of the seven pieces seen below are double-sided. All are roughly six by eight inches, except for Ash Wednesday, which is closer to eight by ten inches. Special materials include dryer lint, vintage aprons, an owl pellet, chickadee egg shells, a wire mesh hose filter (for the laundry tub), communion wafer, wine, fabric softener sheets and other found materials.

This series informs the piece I'm currently working on (see below). The experiment has since morphed into a series of fabric pieces (art quilts?) diverging along lines of spiritual expression, politics, death and decay, nature and the domestic. The series has been exhibited twice, installed in a church space and in the basement of a warehouse, hung by pins on clothesline, in no particular order.