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From my first creative acts, repetition and pattern have been dominant features. My relationship to pattern changed dramatically sixteen years ago when I began working as a textile designer in the garment industry. The four years I spent doing this work expanded my knowledge of the industrial side of textile manufacturing, built on ever-increasing consumption and waste. This experience shifted my ideas about our complex relationship to productivity in general, inspiring my practice of offering sustained attention to discarded mass-produced items.

Painted between 2010 and 2016, In Time and Repetition marks the beginning of this new way of working. All fifteen paintings are based on four items: a polyester shirt from Idol in San Francisco, a polyester skirt from Village Discount Outlet Thrift in Columbus Ohio, a tablecloth from New Bohemia in Austin Texas, and a woven skirt which was left on the paper cutter at Creativity Explored art studio in San Francisco. Each item I work with is carefully collected, and when one is chosen as the source material for a series of paintings, I spend an enormous amount of time working with it. Giving such attention to quickly made objects is built into my process, and a response to the culture of disposability. While the work has conceptual underpinnings, my paintings also function in the realm of the poetic. It is my hope that my labor-intensive process will produce works with a particular materiality, so that meaning can unfold slowly over time.