"Buffalo Song" at Avis Frank Gallery, Houston, TX
I have been considered for a book about Textiles and Text. The book is an overview of 1000 contemporary female artists using textiles and text in their work.
The book will be published in 2021 by Timglaset Editions of Sweden, edited by Amanda Earl.
As part of the process of putting the book together each artist was given a set of interview questions. Below are the questions and my answers.
1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, where you’re based, a bit about your art?
I currently live and work in Tallahassee, FL. I was born in and have mostly lived in the Southern United States of America. I grew up in Baton Rouge, LA where I was surrounded by people from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds - Spanish, French, Italian, African, Native American, Asian and British. Those people were fiercely proud of their heritage as well as being proud of being Louisianians.
My own artistic sensibilities are rooted in this upbringing. I have always admired art that blends different time periods and peoples and comes from collective experiences. My work is mostly about identity, sense of place and stories whether they be individual's stories or community stories. The landscapes of the South are prominent in my work even though I do not paint a many landscapes, I consider them to be as important as the people I meet and I listen to their stories.
2. Can you describe your work with combining textiles and text? Please name a work
and discuss it, process and the motivation behind its creation.
While I learned to sew, embroider and quilt from my grandmother, mother and aunt and I understand why other artists would refer to their use of textiles as "women's work", I have never assigned a gender orientation to the use of textiles in my own work. I think of sewing, crocheting, knitting, stitching and textile design to be about construction, materials and technique and gender neutral. I have a background in architectural design. Using the fabric to dye, cut patterns, stitch and create either 3-D or 2-D pieces of artwork is very architectural to me.
Some of the objects that I have created such as "Buffalo Song", "Surveillence Maritime" or a series of shifts that are about women disappearing on the border of Texas and Mexico I consider to be sculptures made of fabric. They are about surface, form and color. They are about space, both enveloping it and being surrounded by it.
"Buffalo Song" is a hanging sculpture with two main elements. One is a very long panel of gold silk fabric that is attached to the ceiling and flows through the second element, a woolen military style jacket onto a hoop skirt armature. The silk is not stitched, it is guided through the jacket and around the armature to look like a beam of light becoming a skirt. A metal armature holds the jacket erect as if it were being worn. At the bottom edge of the skirt there are words from a Lakota-Sioux Buffalo Song written in pencil, circling around the partial sphere that creates the skirt. The piece is about the intersection of European and Native cultures, iconic forms and words representing the language and sound of the songs.
In some ways the piece is about my great-grandmother Marie Dean Smalley Overbeck who along with her sister made her way to Oklahoma as a young woman. They traveled from Kansas into what was then called Indian Territory to homestead. For my great-grandmother this was freedom to create a new life for herself. She met her husband there. He claimed the plot of land next to hers. She was unwittingly part of the demise of a culture of people and unfortunately probably part of the over farming in Oklahoma and what would create the "Dust Bowl".
"Buffalo Song" represents the sunlight and nomadic life of the Native-American tribes of that area who hunted and respected the American Bison. The song was sung before a hunt to call the buffalo and prepare the hunters. The military style jacket represents the Europeans moving west, claiming land and usurping territories from the First Peoples. The European and United States military jackets were prized by Native Americans and incorporated into their own style of dress. The hoop armature echoes the hoop skirt of the era. The penciled and very subtle words of the Buffalo Song written along the bottom of the defacto skirt is a requiem to that lost way of life. The song whose text I used is still being sung and danced and will not be forgotten.
My great-grandmother's wish for freedom and a new life lead her to a place where other cultures were being destroyed. I feel that it is my duty to create something that honors those First Peoples and their cultures as they honored the land and the buffalo.
3. How does it fit in with the rest of your artistic practice?
"Buffalo Song", "Surveillance Maritime", the shifts about missing women in Northern Mexico, "A Gesture of Love" and other constructions using fabric, dye, stitching and text are all inspired by people. They are about hardworking people looking for their place in the world and the hope of fulfilling their best potential.
The people who inspire me are women and men, every day people. They struggle and they succeed, they celebrate and they mourn, they live. My work is about life and the stories of individuals and communities.
I choose the materials and techniques that best express what I am thinking and feeling. Sometimes that comes to me in an image. Sometimes the materials themselves inspire the idea. I like to to create sculptural things with texture, rich colors and a lot of handmade detail. Textiles are often my choice for expressing memories of people because the clothes, their forms and styles, embody power.
4. Can you please name one or two women visual artists who work with language/text
who have influenced or inspired you and why they have done so?
I have to be honest and say that I cannot think of any women artists who have specifically influenced or inspired my work with text.
The women whose text has inspired me the most have been writers: Irene Nemirovsky, Zora Neale Hurston, Willa Cather and Pearl Buck. These authors/artists are women who write about life and whose words evoke powerful images.
5. Anything you would like to add?
While I have been included in this book because I am a female artist who uses text and textiles in my work, what I want most is to be seen as an artist. An artist who tells stories, who creates subtle and powerful images and who perhaps heals through those stories and images.
