A Brief Description of My Process

There are no fixed rules, and I don't always do it this way, but I usually begin a drawing by laying out a selection of fifty or more colorful scraps—whatever appeals to me at that very moment—from boxes of hundreds of fragments of patterned fabric, cut out before & during my work on each drawing, each scrap with fusible, an archival heat-sensitive adhesive, attached to its back—on a makeshift 4' x 8' table I set up for the occasion. It takes hours or even days of manipulating the scraps on another table covered with silicon release paper to rough out a figure or figures or partial figures or a head. Often I have to dig back into my boxes of scraps to find something else or even cut new scraps from one of my many fabrics When I've taken the figure or figures or head as far as I can and it still interests me, I use an iron to fuse the scraps together. Then I try to find a fabric from among my boxes of fabrics, variously catagorized, to use as a ground. (The ground itself may need substantial changes as work on the drawing progresses). To provide weight & substance for all the sewing to come, I fasten the ground fabric to raw canvas with more fusible, then fuse the roughed-out imagery to the fabric-canvas ground. At this point and even immediately afterwards, when I sew around each scrap to hold it in place so that I can wad it up to fit under the sewing machine without its falling off, my drawings could be regarded as  pure collage.

But this is only the beginning of a long process of sewing-into. Sewing/drawing is the essential transformative agent, an uncanny truth-teller. I stitch into the scraps and the ground with a Consew 2033R industrial zig-zag sewing machine, using free-motion embroidery to draw lines and lay in areas of solid or scumbled color. By this means alone, I create transitions, unify disparate elements, carve out space, model form, and otherwise meld the variously patterned parts into a compelling whole. My sewn drawings and sewn books are artifacts of this process.

Because I make decisions on the fly, my eyes in shatterproof close-work glasses six inches from the needle, I start and stop sewing many times during an hour. I sew a little, cut the threads, look at what I've done, sew a little more, cut the threads, sew some more, stop and look again, cut the threads, change thread color and possibly also bobbin color, resume sewing, and so on. Each separate sewn passage has a long thread at the beginning and another hanging off the end of it, as well as a set of bobbin threads on the back of the work. After an hour of sewing, so many threads are hanging off the surface of the drawing that I can no longer see what I am doing and have to stop sewing. It takes about an hour, using a needle, forceps, and jeweler's pliers, to draw the threads back one by one. It takes another hour, again using forceps, to tie the threads off and then to trim the excess with thread snips. Drawing the threads back and tying them off is contemplative time for me.

Things have to be neat front and back because I never know when revisions will require the undoing of large or small parts of a drawing. I can't pick out the stitches if I don't know where they are. My sewn drawings and sewn books take so long to make because I usually don't know what they are going to look like until they are well under way, and even when I do, there are surprises until almost the end. But all I have to know is what to do next. The process does all the heavy lifting. I don't have to imagine anything, just pay attention to what is happening under my hands and respond to it.