Textile-based inquiry

This museum-based research project marked a significant shift in my practice. As Graduate Fellow in Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum (2022–23), I collaborated with curator Kate Irvin on Sensing Fashion, an exhibition shaped around a major donation of contemporary high-fashion garments. For the exhibit, I developed embroidered samples based on microscopic videos of the garments' surfaces, stitched using an industrial Tajima embroidery machine. The project was part of a larger investigation into whether digital embroidery could convey the sense of wonder often experienced with hand-embroidered work.

“Ring-a-ring o’-Roses, A pocketful of Posies; A-tisha! a-tisha! All fall down.”

tree song is part of for D: becoming a tree, a larger body of work I developed from the myth of Apollo and Daphne. In Ovid's telling, Daphne becomes a laurel tree to escape Apollo's pursuit. In 2022 I searched the full-text collection of the HathiTrust Digital Library for the phrase “becoming a tree” and selected twelve passages from the results. I digitally stitched these fragments into a single textile, and the work became part of my material exploration of lace-like structures made through machine stitching.

Eleven of the twelve passages come from works written by men or published without attribution under male editors. The one woman in the search did not publish under her own name. The preface to Esthwaite Water is signed “The Authoress.” In it, she explains that she appears before the public anonymously and that the book's profits will support charitable and educational work. Her passage extends the parable of the mustard seed to her own small book, which she hopes will grow into a tree. She is the only writer among the twelve who applies the phrase to herself.

The sources, in the order they appear in the work, are:

1. Thomas Nuttall, The North American Sylva, vol. 1 (1852): the box-leaved Eugenia at Key West.
2. W. H. Muldrew, Sylvan Ontario (Toronto, 1901): the Canadian juneberry.
3. Leslie A. Viereck and Elbert L. Little Jr., Guide to Alaska Trees (US Department of Agriculture, 1974): the Scouler willow.
4. Marshall Kittredge Abbott, Myopia Songs & Waltzes (1897): the Myopia Hunt Club in Massachusetts, described as a sapling.
5. Harvey Monroe Hall, “Studies in Ornamental Trees and Shrubs,” University of California Publications in Botany (1910): the Eugenia hedge.
6. Hall (1910): the bottlebrush Callistemon speciosus.
7. Hall (1910): the bottlebrush Callistemon speciosus.
8. The Penny Cyclopaedia (1837), article “Cupressus”: the spreading cypress.
9. The Penny Cyclopaedia (1835), article “Bambusa”: tabasheer, a substance secreted by bamboo.
10. Charles Knight, ed., The English Cyclopaedia: Natural History (1854), article “Acer”: the curled maple.
11. Rabindranath Tagore, Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life (1913): the seed and its dharma.
12. Esthwaite Water: A Poem in Three Parts (1854), “By a Lady”: the author's hope for her book.