The accretion of words, gestures, and feelings add layers of memory and meaning to one's life. We build our lives by incremental acts. Each act enriches and adds to a purposeful life. I value the invested time, intention, and labor in my work through the repetitive acts in textile making. Repetition creates mindfulness and centers attention on the task at hand; whether it's throwing a shuttle across a set of yarns, punching a needle into cloth, pulling ink with a squeegee across a table, or looping yarn through rows of chain stitches.
My work embodies a physical and psychological presence connecting through our senses and our emotional underpinnings. It is through these accumulative actions and the seduction of materials that my work attempts to be experienced and understood. carrieburckle.com
As an improvisational dancer, movement is where my artistic process begins:
Toward that place we feel exposed.
Where our primitive secret feelings live.
That jagged, frenetic, outburst.
An eruption of euphoria, ecstasy and pain.
A secret place because it’s personal.
Revealing, yet Universal.
I believe, this is a gift of the human condition and never changes.
I translate movements into abstract gestural figurative calligraphy using cloth, paper, dye, ink, stitch and other mixed media elements. Some of my work is two-sided, transparent and sculptural representing the face of what we present, versus that which we keep hidden. The dye process itself, furthers the relationship of my work to the body — dye unites with cloth on a cellular level.
Through visual movement dynamics, scratches and frayed edges - like wrinkles and silver strands of hair, my work celebrates and represents a story of the effects of time, aging and imperfection — a universality to the human condition. @anifaye
Josh Friedman uses nature and memory as a starting point for his abstractions. They are meditations on light, time, texture and surface design. The work takes form in a range of materials and modalities, sculpture, mixed-media drawing and collage.
Working with fire and paper in his practice, the thousands of individual residual marks draw as much attention to absence, as to what is present. Burning holes through the surface of the picture plane challenges the physical integrity of the paper, and heightens the tension and awareness of the delicate edge between form and emptiness. Making the fragile, more fragile. @Joshfriedmanart
Jane Bauman was born in Burbank California and considers growing up in the Los Angeles area to be a formative influence. Surf culture, the hippie movement, psychedelic music and Hollywood were all there and combined to make for a provocative environment.
After graduating from Santa Clara University Bauman went to graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute where she became an active participant in the punk/no wave culture of the late 1970s and began to do her first street art as well as making paintings and sculpture. This was also when she began to do collaborative work with fellow artists Jack Johnston and Mark C. Jane Bauman
My artwork reflects a passion to shape order out of chaos—to start with bits of threads and fabrics and make something complex and satisfying where nothing existed before. As I create, I embrace and celebrate the ancient heritage and language of cloth and the material culture that textiles inherently express. My inspiration often comes from exploring the nature of cloth itself – an exploration of weave structures, the physical properties of fibers and the colorful interplay of warp and weft - and also springs from travel experiences with different cultures from around the globe. My processes are grounded in my deep love of weaving, combined with quilting, surface design and stitching. Cameron Taylor-Brown
Driving With My Eyes Closed: Elise Vazelakis Weaves Tradition Into Trash
In Driving With My Eyes Closed, Elise Vazelakis reclaims the overlooked. Twining together strands of plastic yarn made from discarded Amazon mailers, she transforms what would otherwise be waste into textured, vessel-like sculptures.
“The work is about what we miss when convenience becomes our default,” says Vazelakis. “I was drawn to twining, one of the oldest known weaving techniques, because it connects to something ancestral, something slow and intentional. But I’m weaving with the very opposite: synthetic waste.”
Through this tension between technique and material, Vazelakis invites reflection on our relationship to excess, disposability, and how consumption becomes invisible over time. The series is a quiet but pointed gesture—calling us to notice what we might otherwise ignore.
Wielding a needle and thread, using thread-worn, deconstructed and reconstructed patchwork quilts as her pallet, MartyO’s wearable art and art quilts are pointed commentary on the stereotypic, disempowering and oppressive roles forced onto women by our society over the last century, and to this very day in many countries in the world. MartyO further explores a variety of themes including: reproductive and voting rights, the environmental damaged caused by the overconsumption of clothing fueled by cheap fast fashion, and the exploitation of cheap labor in modern “sweat shops.” Her more surreal and abstract art quilts reinforce her warm connections to her ancestors (and her unrealized dreams). Zero-waste design principles often determines the size, shape, and direction of her work. Often the provenance of the textiles have been lost, yet new narratives emerge in her textile reincarnations. marty-o.com
As the son of an U. S. Air Force mechanic, Jim Jenkins realized at a young age his own interest in combining mechanisms and art. Early influences include the work of Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) and American sculptor George Rickey (1907-2002), both pioneers in kinetic art. Coincidentally, both also have ties with Jim’s home state of Indiana (USA). Rickey was born in South Bend and taught at Indiana University. The town of Columbus houses one of Tinguely’s only U.S. commissions, a thirty foot tall work entitled “Chaos I” completed in 1974.
Jim received his BFA from Murray State University in Kentucky and a MFA from Syracuse University in New York. In 1981 he moved west to head the sculpture program at California State University, Fullerton. He retired from teaching in 2018.