Artist Statement
I have lived for twenty-eight years in Seattle's Duwamish Valley, an industrial corridor along one of the most polluted waterways in the United States. This place shapes my work. My practice moves between studio work in textiles and technology and social projects that create shared creative experiences with my neighbors. Both investigate what it means to make art from a compromised landscape, asking how creative practice might transform material conditions rather than simply represent them.
My current research centers on Dye Pharm, a project exploring plant-based pigments grown and foraged in the Duwamish Valley. I work with hyperaccumulators—plants that draw heavy metals from contaminated soil into their tissues—extracting pigments that carry the valley's pollution into new form. When I grow a dye garden with community members and we make pigments together, we participate in a small act of remediation: pulling toxins from the ground, transforming them into color, dispersing them to places unburdened by industrialization. This inverts the usual flow, where contaminated soil moves to landfills near vulnerable communities. The displacement is actual and symbolic—the plants absorb toxins, and the gesture reimagines where polluted matter might go.
This attention to transformation also drives my social practice. In 2006, I created the Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival, where participants learn to shoot analog film, receive subsidized materials, and screen their work locally. In a neighborhood with few gathering spaces, the festival builds temporary architecture for people to see and be seen. Like the dye work, it uses a technology often dismissed as obsolete to create connection and shift what feels possible in a place.
Across these projects, I am interested in how art reconstitutes relationships—between people and land, between neighbors, between damaged systems and the communities that inherit them. Making together becomes a way of addressing inequity not through critique alone, but through practices that enact different ways of being with a place.