It took five year’s worth of dyeing, collecting, growing, and researching to accumulate the fibers and fabrics that make up the works from “I Guess You Had To Be There,” a portfolio of naturally dyed textile pieces. The dyes come from wood shavings, flowers, and roots (with the occasional insect pigment). Native species, wild plants, and rural landscapes are intricately connected. I can represent the land, partially, with things that grew there.

Embroidery and the other fiber techniques I use are precise and slow mediums, I balance this slowness by adding spontaneity early in the process. I switched from a digital camera to an antique polaroid;it doesn’t deliver perfect reproductions, instead I get something often flawed, but beautifully tinted and serendipitous. Collaborating with nature through botanical dyes and using an anachronistic camera means accepting moments of random chance; light, weather, temperature, and location all determine the results, hence the title of this body of work.