Barcelona Queenie

Barcelona Queenie is a mixed media embellished textile assemblage sized approximately 12 x 6".  It is completed handworked, and features sequin and bead embroidery, applique, and use of found objects like the laminated imagery, prayer card, crocheted dress, and re-purposed costume jewelry.  The base fabric is silk dupioni.

My current work, consisting of hand-worked embellished textile assemblages, hinge on intersections and the inherent tension, disorientation, and anxiety arising from conceptual and material collisions.  The pieces investigate personal and cultural issues that are intentionally difficult: I believe good art comes from friction, micro or macro. The work glistening with embellishment and embedded with treasures beckons the viewer while presenting fractious imagery. Incorporating personal narrative and popular culture iconography within Catholic inspired compositions, the medium of embellished textiles enables the investigation of polemic or emotionally murky subject matter with a material that can be a decorative foil for the content. My method of hand beading and quilting creates a dimensional surface that is highly tactile and luscious. Thoroughly complex and work-intensive creative processes attract me; the art in the work happens during the creative process, and the process becomes a type of meditative labor of stitching symbols and binding narratives.  They are my personal altars, embedded within a ritualized context.  I draw inspiration from objects that embrace artifice and decoration: Haitian prayer banners, Gothic reliquaries, Byzantine mosaics and paintings, Vienna Secession art and architecture.  My aim is to create beauty; works that have the capacity to be seductively decorative in form and disconcerting in content.