Mary Oliver 

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I am deeply involved with values of affection, interconnectedness, and kinship that manifest through my practice of handwaving, ritual and healing through plants. My sculptures offer a vehicle for communion between humans and plants. Working with the migrant plant-wisteria vine that grows in my garden, I am fascinated with her ability to thrive in a non-native environments and to expand in multiple directions at once. Wisteria vine is reaching out with her runners to sense, touch and to wrap around objects in order to grow. 

 

Inspired by the theme of kinship and the philosophy of ecofeminist Donna Haraway—whose writing is a significant point of reference for my work, I approach the creation of stems and runners of wisteria vine as channels of communication. I immerse myself in Donna Haraway’s “SF creatures” (speculative feminism, string figures, speculative fabulation, science fiction), breathing my own storytelling into the woven forms born from the earth.

 

This body of work is about re-membering and re-establinshing a connection with non-human species through activation of our senses of touch, vision and smell. Similar to Donna Haraway who adopted symbols of ‘tentacular thinking' that represent diverse forms of intelligence, I make kin with probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing runners of wisteria by opening up to her arborescent being and her alternative state of consciousness. 

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Building on spiritual gifts of wisteria as well as her material qualities that were employed in the process of fiber and traditional basket making for centuries, I take it further and create abstract sculptures that loosely draw upon the qualities of the plant. Playing sculpturally with fibers, I primarily focus on paper. I hand-spin and sculpt paper to shape it into a yarn. This process has a healing quality as I reverse the processed generic paper into a hand-spun yarn which is woven into abstract sculptural forms reminiscent of wisteria’s runners, stems, pods and flowers. 

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