After a residency with the National Park Service at the Tallgrass National Preserve in the Flint Hills of Kansas and study with fiber artist, Jiyoung Chung, I continue to develop a project around my experience of the plains landscape in the Flint Hills - its spaciousness, soft horizons, the echo of center and sensed arcs.

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My recent work explores place perceived both as exterior and interior fields, and records the experience of returning, tracing over paths traveled and rutted into prairie earth, the perception of direction, and remembrance through repetition in stitch and print and through kneading and binding of hanji using the process of joomchi.

Both the art process recalls and the artifact maps such experience as memory and impression. 

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I consider series and repetitive markmaking deeply connected to the act of marking hallowed spaces. 

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Bison migration and the creation of bison wallows are profoundly orienting markers in the vast western plains. Etched into prairie earth, bison trace and wallow were repeatedly returned to over centuries by bison herds and also used by other travelers in the plains. 

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My work also is informed by narratives of prairie travelers returning and tracing paths and the quest for direction amidst the rising and falling arcs of horizon:  of women lost on the prairie, of traveler coincident with center navigating when direction appears elusive. Arcs perceptibly rise and fall in the landscape and in one’s path, unfolding, subtle, fluid, and giving way to a deep sense of center, palpable, ever present.