After decades as a practicing studio textile artist I am revisiting my early work, as a painter. This new series takes me back to my art school emphasis, but is now informed by my texture and collage work of the intervening years.

Instead of the fine silks and lustrous synthetics, I'm using a basic black cotton canvas (which I usually use as the structural backing for my pieces)

I apply paints with brushes, rollers and squeegees and sometimes do a silk screen overprint of random images as my initial surface design. These painted/printed surfaces are cut up and reassembled in overlaid collage forms.

Some of these are held together with a waxed linen cord in a long, graphic basting stitch pattern. This is an homage to the traditional Japanese custom, "boroboro", which reuses fragments of cloth from various functional textiles, including family heirlooms, into a new, hybrid textile.  It is a way of preserving and honoring the beauty of an important object beyond its useful life.