I’d like to share with you my greatest passion in life. And when I say life, I mean my entire life. You could say I was born with a blanket in my hands, for within weeks of my birth, we were inseparable. Linus had nothing on me. I suppose, like millions of other infants, the blanket held a sense of security, but for me, my love for fabric wouldn’t be a passing phase. Little did family members suspect that my affection for the soft cozy fabric and its smooth, silky satin binding, which I ran between my fingers over and over and over, would lead to a career and my artistic medium.

To my benefit, it was the 60s when women sewed more than today, and mothers taught their daughters. My obvious nature was being nurtured. My two older sisters and I started by gluing felt together to cloth our trolls. When I was old enough to use the sewing machine, my mother helped me make clothing for my Snoopy. He had an entire wardrobe, including a seersucker jacket, corduroy trousers and even a silk kimono. I moved on to making Barbie’s outfits, then ultimately my own clothing. I made my prom and graduation dresses. In high school, I envisioned becoming a fashion designer. On weekends, I commuted from Staten Island to Manhattan to take courses at Parsons. The first being dress pattern making, and the second silk screening on fabric. This one sealed the deal to pursuing textile design.

I attended Drexel University’s design and merchandising department before transferring. Their work program allowed me to do two internships at a place called the Fabric Workshop, there in Philadelphia. This proved to be a valuable experience and a goldmine of printing knowledge and undoubtedly the clincher that afforded the opportunity of acceptance into Rhode Island School of Design. My approach with textiles focused on working with the nature of fabric, by allowing this to dictate the design and the approach to my application. In a technique I created at school, I laid double stick tape down the length of the printing table and arranged the fabric on this with wrinkles and folds. On the fabric, I printed a grid pattern referring back to the warp and the weft grid of the fabric. Once the fabric was opened, the underlying folds that resisted the print would create a new overall pattern.

After graduation, I worked in New York at the fashion house WilliWear/WilliSmith.  As their textile designer, I made several trips to India where our fabrics were manufactured either in factories in Bombay, as it was then known as, or in the cottage industries of the south. By cottage industry, I’m referring to looms set up in the backyards of shanties where family members took turns weaving 24 hours a day.

I quit the business after four years, desiring to pursue my own work and not design trendy fabric for mass appeal.  Maybe, it was the spirituality India is drenched in that stirred  a desire to explore a deeper level of introspection. I was beginning to sense a distance from my authentic self and a yearning to connect with the natural world. California held the promise of a lifestyle more in-tuned with nature. I moved there and set up a printing studio and for thirty years created silk scarves that sold in fine boutiques around Los Angeles and in open-studio gatherings.

What draws me to fabric is not just its tactile quality or playing with the rich colors silk reflects, but its very construction and inherent visual feature; repetition. From the grid of the warp and weft weave, to the patterns printed down its length, I connected to the seduction of repetition. From a young age, my eye had been drawn to finding the repeat in the fabric’s design. I quickly developed the skills to put a motif into a seamless repetition and a keen ability to visualize completed patterns.

Along the way, I started seeing the repetitions people create in their life and its results. I began to see how our habits i.e.; posture, exercise, nutrition, thoughts and emotions become like the motifs in a textile pattern, and how once repeated create the complete picture of who we are. When I moved to California, I also took up the study of the human body. Using weight training, yoga, meditation and nutrition as my applications, and the body, mind and spirit as the medium, my own very fibers also become my fabric work. For the last thirty years, I have whittled a life that creates happiness and well-being. As a fitness coach and yoga teacher, I help clients sculpt beautiful patterns in themselves.

Recently, my study has shifted more to photographing patterns I am drawn to and digitally repeating them in different ways. Mostly, there is no manipulation of the actual image, just its relationship with itself multiplied. They are printed on paper and often their scale and proportion are that of a length of fabric, expressing the continuous nature of fabric and textile design.