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I am currently working on many projects at once. In addition to creating new thread on fabric pieces, I'm also reworking earlier paper pulp sculptures that I made - with the exception of one - when I lived in New Mexico. This photograph shows them in varying stages of completion.

Mela Insana

"Mela Insana" 2016

A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken. — Terry Tempest Williams

With the exception of the tornado and a few line work details, I created this piece in its entirety by stitching small squares, and variations of the square, to evoke mosaic tile art. I consider "Mela Insana" to be a natural evolution of my some of my earlier thread pieces that utilize the square as a design element as well as my glass tile mosaic sculptures. 

I originally titled this piece "Aubergine" in reference to the dark color of the tornado and in the figure's dress, but because this piece is based on Raphael's painting "Elisabetta Gonzaga", 1504-06, I thought the Italian word for eggplant would be more appropriate. I discovered the name "Mela Insana", ("bad apple") which was folk-etymologized* from the Italian melanzana. I liked this play on the word and how it relates to the visual metaphor of the tornado. As an aside, Raphael also designed mosaics, most notably his ‘Creation of the World' in the dome of the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, executed around 1516.

The landscape on the left side represents the past and its relatively untouched natural world. The right side represents an unknown future, with a tornado that symbolizes constricted energy containing the potential for both great destruction and expansive awareness. 

* http://languagehat.com/the-multifarious-aubergine/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_of_the_World_(Raphael)

Woman with Scarab / Grace

"Woman with Scarab" 2016

"Grace" 2016

I have immortal longings in me.  —Shakespeare

“Woman With Scarab” and “Grace” were each hand stitched on a hoop frame. Because they are a smaller size than my usual work, I brought these pieces with me to work on when I traveled. With both of them, I’m interested in playing with contrasting and harmonizing patterns and colors and I chose the images and designs more for visual reasons than for any particular symbolic meaning. Although the Egyptian scarab and the Islamic motifs evoke distinct cultures, here they represent “Culture” in a general way, just as the portraits, taken out of context, no longer represent a specific person. 

The figure in “Woman With Scarab” references the painting “Portrait of a Young Woman” by Antonio Pollaiolo, 1475. She is stitched with small squares that mimic mosaic tiles and is juxtaposed on top of a geometric pattern. I created the design of the dress using an Islamic floral pattern and added a large scarab to her hair. 

The figure in “Grace” comes from a photograph of an unnamed woman in the book “Portraits of the Insane, the Case of Dr. Diamond”, who I used as my model. I find that there is an incongruent and transcendent joy and grace that emanates from her, and I wanted to capture some of it in my stitching. I worked on this piece when I visited my dying mother, and that changed the way that I came to interpret its meaning. The background is an imperfectly copied Islamic geometric design that I think perfectly symbolizes the pulsing energy of the universe. I added the chicken because I liked the way it related to the pattern of the dress, but I later thought: the chicken is going home to roost.

Demiurge With Map Egg

"Demiurge With Map Egg"  2016

“In the Mysteries, the Universal Egg was likened to an egg which the Cosmic Goose had laid in space.” 

— Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

“What the Greeks and Gnostics called the ‘Demiurge’ is a Universal Intelligence that fashions our world. One way to understand the Demiurge is to think of it as the World Soul.” — Tom Montalk 

In many ways “Demiurge With Map Egg” is an introduction piece for my future series of stitched maps. 

I refer to the egg form as a ‘map egg’ because each of the six delineated sections of the egg contain images that correspond to a separate map that will be in the new series. The egg works both as a specific metaphor - within it are the embryos of finished work - and as a more general symbol of Universal Egg, described in the book ‘The Secret Teachings of All Ages’: “in whose transparent depths creation exists…the perfect image of all terrestrial activity.”

The swing-set depicted in the central section also works on two levels. It will be one of the images in a map entitled ‘Memory Map’ and it refers to an actual swing-set from my childhood that evokes strong memories and associations. As a simple visual icon the swing-set, with its two side by side swings, also represents the duality of the manifest world: an individual ego identity and the named and defined world surrounding it.

In researching the Cosmic Egg, I came across the idea of the demiurge. Plato described it as a subordinate deity who fashions the sensible world in the light of eternal ideas. To the Gnostics, the demiurge is the immortal mortal, responsible for our physical existence (and the suffering we must go through in connection with it) by fabricating the world. Both of these definitions worked well with my intention for the figure in the piece to be a larger than life mythological character who’s inextricably linked with the egg form.

The figure and map egg are overlaid on a design that was influenced from Egyptian iconography. This background symbolizes the unified energy field on which the created world plays out.