As a self-taught artist, my practice is informed by the Ancestral and the Everyday. I am descended from Belorussian weavers and Scottish wool mill workers, granddaughter to a woman who asserted herself as a feminist artist decades before it was part of the mainstream critical discourse, and daughter to a woman who instilled in me a sense of freedom in creativity and production of work. Amidst the strong feminine energy and creative magic that surrounded my childhood, there was trauma and hardship: tragic loss, chronic illness, poverty, disease, addiction. It was growing up in an unstable environment that pushed me to escape into my art, where I could manifest my own reality, where there was freedom, and where I was safe with my work, away from the physical realm that betrayed me first by destabilizing my home life, then continued to betray me by the way it transformed my body into something unruly. In fibre art, a medium I worked within for years in different capacities - soft sculpture, embroidery, fabric painting - I am deeply soothed and find safe intimacy and connection, in the way combing an animal’s coat with fingertips or playing with a lover’s hair is soothing.
My practice over the past few years has looked to transmute the medically invasive and psychologically looming events of my personal history and the critical gaze through which imperfections of the female form are perceived through meticulously handworked stitches; like this, I have become surgeon to my own trauma and midwife to my own self-delivery.
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