Neons
Neons II, 2019.
The Neon series of tapestries was inspired by Carmen Herrera’s minimalist abstract paintings, and imbued with an interest in the craft history of neon. Neon is often represented in a commercial context, and the slowness of tapestry weaving felt at odds with the pace of consumerism. These tapestries are woven with wool from sheep raised by my father and stepmother, which is sent to a mill and blended in with wool from sheep all over their region. The compulsion in this series was to muddy a distinction between contemporary and traditional by intermixing medium, colors and symbols from different lived experiences and locations of time, and transposing them into singular compositions.
It is also a meditation on the passage of time. I was first introduced to Carmen Herrera’s work when she was in her 90’s, after she had been making work for most of her life. Her dual identity as a woman and an immigrant had made it so there was no proper recognition of her contribution to the cannon until she had reached the end of her life. The dedication and persistence she showed her creative life, combined with the strength of the work itself, inspired me to respond.
The Ferns within this series also reference neon signs, a symbol of contemporaneous capitalism and force destroying our natural world. Bringing in forest imagery as the sign's language, this work is a billboard for ferns and other fractals found in nature, fighting for their lives and for ours. This series seeks to give voice to a natural world and order that we are very much a part of although many of us have been taught that we are separate from it. This separation is false, just as the notion of contemporaneity is a distinction between future and past that is nonexistent in the quantum world.
