Artist Statement: I am not a weaver. My paintings of archaeological textile fragments are the result of collaborations with museum collections. This textile I study teases me with stories of its makers, but also of thieves and merchants, collectors, curators and conservators. I paint as a response to the textile’s illusiveness, honoring its history.

Whether a garment or a protective covering for a sacred text, this aged fragment has become something else. My subject is that transformation. I even paint the fine stitches with which the conservator binds the unruly threads to stiff muslin.

Re-presented as a monumental abstraction, each mark of paint both makes and unmakes an image of fabric. Over millennia the architectural grid of cloth returns to its biological origins, what looks like a coastline decays and transforms with time. This painting is testament to the paradox—what is interwoven will ultimately unravel, and that which grows will inevitably decay.

Each painted thread must be invented and spun, each painted fabric must be simultaneously structured and then pulled apart. By magnifying the scale and taking up multiple perspectives, I invite the viewer to take a journey across expanses that are simultaneously minute and vast. I honor the long life of the artifact, its ever-changing three-dimensional sculptural presence. My work invokes the digital coordinates of warp meeting weft, the matrix of yarn. And yet it also draws our attention to the insubordinate nature of this woven fragment, rebelling after centuries of wear.

Recent projects in my Portraits of Ancient Linen series include The Heroes Tapestries at The Met Cloisters, “Think Big!” at the Bode Museum (Berlin), and Homages to Wari Weaving at the German Textile Museum (Krefeld).