Finally.

Closing on a new house today, and moving from the "temporary" apartment we have been in for the past year to a place where I will have a real studio once again.

These past two years have been the most difficult time in my life: It began when my husband was laid off two weeks after I became pregnant. He was unemployed for 7 months. He finally got a job in DC, and commuted there every week for two months at the end of my complicated pregnancy. Five days after giving birth, we moved to a temporary 2 bedroom apartment in DC with a large dog, a cat, and a new baby. Temporary nursery for the daughter I have been waiting for my whole life. We commuted back to NC every weekend with an infant during her first few months of life, getting our house ready to go on the market. Postpartum depression and heartbreak when we discovered our daughter has a hearing disability and will wear hearing aids for the rest of her life, which means the first 6 months were filled with tests, we continue to meet with teachers every week to be sure her speech develops normally. The cost of hearing aids far surpasses the lifetime insurance cap of $1,000 for her hearing disability. In January, I started three evening jobs at various universities after watching my daughter all day. My husband has done consulting work on top of his full-time job. During this time, I stayed up late and got up early to embroider in a corner of our bedroom, to draw and paint on paper pinned up on the wall of our living/dining room. We still have not sold our house in NC, which means we have been paying rent and mortgage for the past year, but buying this house will keep us from pouring more money down the drain in rent.

Continuing to make art during this period makes me more proud than anything else I have accomplished in my life.... it also kept me alive.

New work is here.

I am thrilled to announce that I will be participating in a group show on mothering in Neoliberalism from a feminist point of view at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin in February of 2011. Stay tuned.

"Your Fragility....", 2010, mother's hair from gestation period embroidered on child's garment, velvet, 15 x 16".

Upon the occasion of my daughter's birth, I became almost agoraphobic, irrationally figuring that, if we never left the house, nothing bad could ever happen to her.

This piece, made within her first six months of life, is a simultaneous invocation for her safety, and a confession of my own newly hyperbolized emotional vulnerability. The hair used is that which was on my head during the time that I dreamt of her, during the time that I carried her. Like rings of a tree, a length of hair embodies the passage of time, carrying a discernible record of an organism's extreme life experiences.

The repetitive act of embroidery seems to be made for calming worry... trying to tie things down, sew them in, make them stay.
Embroidering with hair possesses its own unique intensity: each barely perceptible stitch is like a rosary bead, marking a tiny but ardent prayer whispered over and over.