Shape the Sky | Skylab Gallery | Columbus, OH

Exhibition Statement

Before my father died, I made a fabric banner with the words pass on into glory stitched into it. I had recently read the phrase in the obituary of a young preacher. When my father died, I stood at the end of his bed as his eyes closed and breath silenced.

It is a great mystery to me, passing on, the breadth and density of the unknown, the other side. In the wake of my father’s death my great hope was for a belief in the afterlife. I still physically ache for it. My imagination has become my balm. In my mind’s eye, I meet my dad on the farm where he was raised, where he learned to make things grow. There are ocean fields of yellowing corn and a pale blue afternoon sky.

This series of works began in the sanctuary of a Methodist church, observing the quiet wooden lattice tucked into the wall and the velvet light of stained-glass windows. I have worked and reworked those patterns into quilts, allowing them to swell and accumulate until I realized they have become the sky, blue bodies of water meeting the horizon, trees on a mountain fading into the distance, the color of the sky at midnight.

In his collection of poems, Book of Hours, Rainier Marie Rilke asks “What will you do God, when I die?” Rilke poses a question of the reciprocity of God’s nature. Does the infinite weep?

I am taken in by pattern because it suggests a possibility of infinite repetition. There are no boundaries. The potential for expansion is limited only by the ability of your mind to continue an implied line. Colors sift and shift into each other, forming atmospheric surfaces that advance and recede. Slow shifts obscure and open, finding a window, an archway, or a door. The strain of puckered seams pull with the weight of denim.  

The medieval anchoress and Christian mystic Julian of Norwich held a small object in her hand, akin to a hazelnut, and wrote “it is all that is made.”

I have only ever been able to measure the infinite by the scale of my own body, the space of a stitch. I wonder if I can hold it, or shape it.