My work starts with my loom. In 2017 I was beginning to worry about what I was going to do after I graduated. I had two areas of study, sculpture, and weaving. I was also interested in philosophy, cultural anthropology, and material and environmental ethics. It just so happened that my interests and studies all converged upon warp weighted looms, a stone age tool talked about in ancient Greek stories that can be made from a few sticks and have infinite possibilities as to what is woven on it. I built one for under $40. I designed it in such a way that if I ever needed to replace parts or upgrade pieces, I could do it with simple hand tools. This cobbled together mess of sticks and string has been my studio mate ever since. 

I wove my first tapestry on that loom in 2019, Caught in the middle, a piece which explored my struggles with what I’d imagined for my life, and what really had. A simple line drawing against a tone-matching gradient background. In this piece, and all my works, the final product is only half the value of what’s been done. The process of sketching concepts, perfecting curvatures, planning colors, planning structures, preparing the wool yarn for dying, dying the wool and adjusting the colors, finishing the wool, balling/skeining/shuttling the wool, assembling the loom, tablet weaving the top hem while simultaneously warping the cotton, attaching the finished hem to the cloth bar of the loom, tensioning the cotton with bricks, spacing the lines of cotton using more cotton and a chain stitch, setting up the leash heddles, weaving the heddles into place, and then, finally, finally beginning to weave the image with the wool took 30 hours of dedicated labor. That time where I carefully, by hand, assembled the components of the loom and managed the fiber, the tedious and unappealing work that goes into making the tapestry on the wall, that’s what one is buying when they purchase my work.