BEYOND THE CRAFT

My work is rooted in an exploration of communication, how we express meaning through color, imagery, and symbols, and how messages can be hidden in plain sight. Textiles are the medium I use to speak. They are familiar and intimate, yet often overlooked, especially in a world where textiles have largely become commodities. After thirty years as an artist and textile designer in the industry, I've become deeply aware of how easily the depth of textile design is dismissed or misunderstood.

Many of my pieces are layered with intention, yet the average viewer spends only about three seconds looking at artwork. That statistic stayed with me. It summed up the challenge I had faced again and again: how do you get people to slow down long enough to truly see? How do you communicate something meaningful when attention disappears almost immediately?

Instead of fighting that reality, I eventually decided to play with it. If people were only going to give me three seconds, I wanted to create work that rewarded those who lingered and quietly teased those who didn't. This led me to embed hidden messages, codes, and visual puzzles into my textiles, allowing the pieces to function on two levels. On the surface, they are beautiful designs. Beneath that surface, they carry an entirely different layer of communication for those willing to look a little longer.

The inspiration for this direction came from reading The Woman Who Smashed Codes, a book about codebreaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman. The idea that you don't have to be a mathematician or linguist to break a code, you have to recognize a pattern, stuck with me. Pattern recognition is at the heart of textile work, and that connection made me think about how often we overlook the visual information in front of us.

Historically, textiles have served as a powerful tool for storytelling, embedding visual cues that reflect cultural, political, and personal narratives through their symbols and motifs. Textiles carry the fingerprints of their time. They record what mattered to a culture, sometimes explicitly and sometimes secretly. By embedding codes and hidden messages, I am honoring a long, global tradition of textiles as carriers of knowledge. By embedding messages, I am creating a visual language to speak about the time I'm living in.

As a trained fiber artist with experience in ikat dyeing, bead weaving, punch needle, and other traditional techniques, I'm drawn to processes that are slow and methodical. I enjoy pushing these techniques, exploring their limits, and seeing how they can hold modern concepts. Seamlessly incorporating codes such as Braille, barcodes, binary, or ciphers into my work adds another layer of interest.

At its core, my work is about inviting curiosity. It's about encouraging people to slow down just enough to discover something unexpected. I love the idea that an image or pattern isn't just decorative but communicative. Those small shifts from passive looking to active engagement are where art becomes a conversation.