In 2002, I made a large expanding installation piece called Topologies, and it was first
shown on the Whitney Biennial.
And it was made of hundreds of black lace parts that I'd collected from all over the
world from Portobello, Flea Market in London, Commercial Lace from San Francisco, Flea Markets
and shops, hat veiling, stocking mesh, all kinds of open work structures that I'd collected
and some of which I had actually made or remade that formed this large topography, this horizontal
physical drawing.
And that project has subsequently been shown for other locations, most recently at the
Victorian Albert Museum in London, and each time it's a different drawing.
It's a different relationship of parts.
I was creating a world that intersected with sort of three spheres simultaneously, the
biological world, because lace has a lot of cellular qualities to it that look like biology,
the internal body or, and secondly, urban sprawl or architecture and then the material
histories that were part of lace.
So I think there are these multiple themes that kept, without privileging one over another,
kept moving and I kept being interested in the piece.
I think my work is rather accessible, again, because the materials I use are very available.
We wear the materials I use, most people have felt a piece of thread.
You don't need to go to art school to do that.
I've been an artist or involved in art since high school.
I went to a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania.
More consciously, it was when I was in high school, you know, and working with a professional
artist and in this sort of the relationship between cultural circumstances and how I was
being taught there and fine art ideas, you know, and that was sort of coming together
in early time.
It seemed like a very exciting, relevant way to spend my life.
I was very affected by, as a young kid, my mom and I would go down to the Detroit Institute
of Art and I would sit in the courtyard and look at the Diego Rivera paintings and I was
so impressed by scale and the power of the cultural circumstances and the politics that
were being painted in those works.
And it was also a bonding time with my mom.
So yeah, art and was extremely important.
You know, I think of art as an inquiry, asking questions about perception and cultural circumstances.
And I'm very, very interested in both, in the opticality and the visual and the cultural
ramifications of anything that's made.
I think of myself sometimes as a long-distance runner artist in that many of my projects take
a number of years to really coalesce and come to be.
