Instructors 2025

My love of texture and fibers started when I convinced our elderly neighbor to teach me to crochet as a child. I spent hours creating with yarn, wood, beads, paper, and leather. From there, it was a continuous weave of materials and
techniques, adding some here, discarding there. I was a maker. I began serious practice as a basket maker in my early 20’s with local community education and fiber arts guilds. When I became a mom, I divided my time between work and my girls, so art took an intermission. Five years later, a my small daughter looked up at me and doubted my claim that I did, in fact, make the basket in her hands. She had never seen me create anything, not really, in her entire life. I made the decision in that moment that I wanted my daughters to understand all that we could do together. We made a change and I re-embraced the artist I knew myself to be. I began weaving at home, developing my own style. Then seeking out opportunities to learn wherever I could find them.

My work is a blend of cultures, traditions, and technical skills. I've spent years asking questions about culture and tradition and how I represent them in my art. I live in an area surrounded by Native lands, and in fact grew up learning Ojibwe art in school, as it was the only art instruction available to me other than drawing or painting. I do not work with those art forms as they are not mine culturally. This lead me to search for, and pursue, learning traditional European weaving techniques and materials, learning from weavers from around the United States, from Spain, and Denmark. From there, I took a pilgrimage to Ireland, working with Joe Hogan, a traditional Irish basket maker turned modern artist, followed by an arts residency at Shankill Castle in Kilkenny, IE. As an American, their cultures and traditions are only ancestrally mine, though their technical aspects are now part of my practice. I blend my years of study and research into my body of work, creating my own style and techniques.

I am now exploring the fusion of modern and traditional techniques with locally sourced
materials as they apply to art basketry. It’s not unusual for a family excursion to include
my teenagers beach combing for driftwood and interesting rocks, or into the forest to collect grasses, tree barks, antlers, and rushes. I’m moved to create unique sculptural shapes that flow with and emphasize the natural elements I’ve used as my focal points. These materials are combined with primary materials of round reed (rattan) or willow to create both sculptural pieces and those with practical uses. As an artist from a small rural area, the bridge between art and craft is a narrow one that I want to continue to explore. Art basketry falls into uncharted waters, fiber arts, mixed media, sculpture; it varies piece by piece.