Artist Statement

I work with natural leaves and crochet, creating an intimate dialog with nature. Found leaves are repaired, embellished and combined using handmade lace crochet – a laborious traditional technique relying on tension, set in direct relationship to the fragile natural material. The resulting forms are a meditation on the beauty and intricacy found in the natural world and a reflection of complex and tender relationships both within ourselves and our environment. 

Working on an unusually detailed scale with very fine hooks, needles and thin cotton threads, I am pushing crochet to its very limits. In some projects I create intricate lace patterns directly onto the edges of single leaves, in others I use crochet sculpturally to reshape, join, mend or extend the leaves to compose pairs, groups and sometimes whole branches. 

Looking closely at a leaf, its uniqueness becomes apparent. Varied in tone, size and shape, no two leaves, even coming from the same tree, are ever the same, each carrying its own individual network of veins like a fingerprint. 

By combining crochet with such a seemingly fragile material as a leaf, I’m seeking to explore themes including the value of time and preciousness of objects, tenderness and tension in human connections, and vulnerability and resilience, found in nature as a whole as well as in the stories of individual beings.

Working with tension is an integral part of the craft, but it can also be seen metaphorically, as managing tension plays a big part in our lives and surroundings, and so the work becomes also a mirror of ourselves and the world around us, opening eyes to the ephemeral yet enduring beauty of nature.