Artist Statement
Permanence, Impermanence combines the craft practices of quilting, natural dyeing, screen printing, and tattooing. The quilt has two layers, with individual imagery taking up each of the 35 dyed squares on the front, and abstractly and intuitively placed silks on the back. These images evoke nostalgia of my childhood memories growing up in Texas. The front layer of the quilt has been dyed with materials common to Texas I gathered this past winter, while the back combines Texan materials and Oregon materials, to represent my present, my reconnection to the land and my Indigenous ancestry. Natural dyes are ephemeral and will fade with exposure to the sun and time, however, the printed imagery will remain. This quilt will eventually hang in my future tattoo studio in New York, where the images will be shared with others through tattooing as a flash sheet. These images will live permanently and impermanently on the bodies of those who they resonate with enough to adorn themselves with, for the rest of their lives, as living art. This quilt, created from craft, time, and meditation, acts as an symbolic self portrait that holds my past, present, and future memories, and it will become a part of the memories and bodies of others through the practice of tattooing. Overall, this quilt will be a living object, continuously evolving through time.
