gallery 4

NATURAL ABSTRACTIONS

These are abstract pieces with nature as a starting point.

CALIFORNIA RICELANDS
Since 2006 the California Rice Commission has selected an artist to represent them to the world. Each year they present clients and legislators with wooden gift boxes, full of rice products and information about the rice growers. An image of my collage will act as the label, evoking the old tradition of produce crates. The collage will also serve as "branding" for the year, being used for notecards, stationary, etc. I am honored to have been selected as their artist for 2010. California Ricelands Video

FIELDS
This is a piece created for a national juried show, "12 Voices". The show opened in Traverse City, Michigan in September of 2008.

DELTA THREE
For years I had looked out of plane windows and thought to myself, all those little squares and funny shapes down there, they look like a quilt… One day it hit me. I make quilts! That was the first “fabric collage”. If you look at “Delta” in the Cal/EPA series you will see a much larger, more refined version of this very first fabric collage.

BRANCH: U-TURN AND STRETCH
These pieces of branches convey feelings, by their very construction and how they relate to the space around them. After more than a year spent working on collages of trees, I focused here on just a very small bit of a tree - a piece of a branch - in an attempt to distill something to its essence.

REFLECTIONS 1 & 2
So many of my collages feature water, but they usually include an object as well as the object's reflection. In this case I chose to look at the more abstract nature of reflections, omitting the object totally and focusing just on the reflection.

WEAVE
This piece had its start with objects in nature. But I chose to focus on color, movement & pattern - letting go of the object in the process.

A NEW LEAF
This piece was awarded as a New Works Grant from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. It was created for Women Escaping a Violent Environment (WEAVE). This piece is about change. It focuses on leaves turning color in the fall, the movement of the wind and the turning of leaves as they dry and fall from the tree. But hidden in the autumn, and nurtured in the winter, is the promise of a new leaf in the spring.

GREEN WATER
Whenever I complete a fabric collage, in addition to taking a photograph of the entire piece, I also take a series of “detail” photos. These show small parts of the piece, illustrating the construction and materials. But I’ve noticed that these detail shots ar e often at least as interesting as the whole finished collage. This piece, Green Water, is my first finished collage that started as a detail. The entire subject is just that little view of the river, framed by rocks. Without the larger context, it has a more abstract feel.

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