2024
Medium: Fiber art — felted wool, embroidery, reclaimed fiber, mixed media
Dimensions: 13″ × 34″ × 3″
Price / Status: $1175 USD — Available for sale
Exhibition History:
The Source – Dunedin Fine Art Center, 2025
Pasco Perspectives – National Arts Program, 2024 — Awarded Best in Show
Themes: Ecological loss and renewal; critique of fast fashion/consumerism; inherited connection to natural systems; resilience
Constructed entirely from reclaimed textiles and a discarded big box store print, *Old Growth* interrogates the possibility of regeneration within systems of consumption and ecological destruction. The work employs textile archaeology—felted wool, embroidery, and salvaged fibers—to reconstruct forms that mimic forest strata and mycorrhizal networks, questioning whether authentic connection to the natural world can emerge from the detritus of what we have consumed.
Fast fashion operates as both ecological and psychological devastation, perpetuating cycles of inadequacy that drive endless acquisition. Yet cheap clothing and manufactured objects cannot address the fundamental void created by our severed relationship with natural systems. Through the labor-intensive process of reconstructing discarded materials into organic forms, Old Growth becomes a meditation on this futility—an acknowledgment that our attempts to recreate nature’s beauty and meaning from the remnants of extraction may be inherently flawed.
The stitched root system that spreads across the work’s scarred surface serves as both memorial and investigation: fragile threads of connection reaching through damaged ground, questioning whether renewal remains possible or whether our reconstructions will forever bear the trace of what was destroyed in their making.
