Exploring Textile Art

In late 2023/early 2024, I began to explore the art of making pigments and dyes from fruits, vegetables, and plants. For many years, I was primarily interested in acrylic painting, and my preferred subject to paint is landscapes. One day, I was peeling acrylic paint off of my palette and looking at my work, a painting of a beach scene. It was at that moment I realized, I was painting a beautiful landscape with a paint that was the equivalent of liquid plastic, and my waste would almost certainly contribute to the pollution of the environment and the destruction of the landscapes I so loved. Art is a love letter to the subject you are making a representation of, so how could I make art of the landscapes I was enamored with in harmony with them?

With this realization, I began to explore how to make my dyes and pigments and participated in my university’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD), where I shared the work I made and the process of making my dyes and pigments. Because of my exemplary work, I received a research grant from my university and began to explore other types of sustainable art-making, leading me to start creating and exploring textile art.

For the past 2 years, I’ve been attending the Dylan Thomas Summer School, a 2-week creative writing program at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. There, I was introduced to the art of quilt-making through the Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Center and felt a strike of inspiration learning the history behind quilt-making in Wales. Additionally, my partner, who works at an Irish heritage shop, introduced me to woven Irish scarves. Immediately, I bought a small pocket loom, yards of organic cotton from Earth Pigments, raw wool, and a drop spindle, and for the past few months, I’ve been learning how to spin yarn/thread,  to dye the thread as well as my cotton fabric,  and the different types of tapestry stitches. The process of making textile art completely by hand is simultaneously incredibly rewarding and incredulously slow, but I find myself enamored with the making of ‘slow art’. It’s astonishing being able to look at a skein of dyed yard sewn into a piece of dyed fabric, knowing that I made everything myself (except the cotton, of course), with only raw wool, a length of cotton fabric, and fruit/vegetable waste/foraged plants. Learning how to make sustainable textile art has been the most challenging thing in my art journey thus far, but the most rewarding.