Recursive and a new work titled Barn Doily are now installed on the lawn and the front of the Dubuque Museum of Art building. These two works are on view ahead of Distorted Recollections: Paper, Paint, and Fiber Works, and exhibition of the Memory series that will open October 28th, 2023 and run until February 11th, 2024.

Barn Doily is a 4ft X 4ft acrylic painting on wood created using the same process as Stain 36.

Originally scheduled for 2020, my first large scale crocheted sculpture, titled Recursive, is now on display as part of Art in the Woods, a series of art installations displayed throughout the American Players Theatre grounds. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, July 24 at 5pm and the art will be available to view until October 9th, 2022.

Recursive was created by crocheting over a mile and a half of manila rope with a 30mm size hook. Each arm is supported by a 10ft piece of steel rebar that is capped with a piece of wood.
The finished work is roughly 6.5 ft X 13 ft X 13ft.

I have used crochet extensively to create forms reminiscent of existing organisms. Much of my art comes from and exists because of nature. However, while I have included the creational aspects of nature in my art, I hadn't yet let the results thrive beyond artificial human-controlled arenas. With Recursive, a large-scale crocheted 'organism' made in the spirit of natural and biological systems, I had the opportunity to create nature-derived art that dwells in the environment that inspired it.

Stain 36, the final work in the Stains series for the foreseeable future, is now on display on the back of the Rountree Gallery in Platteville, Wisconsin. The piece is a 5ft X 10ft mural and, like the other works in the series, was made mostly by spraying acrylic paint through a crochet doily. Usually, the Stains series are created using found antique or vintage doilies, but because of the size of the substrate, I crocheted a 5ft diameter doily using 13 strands of crochet thread and a size 7mm crochet hook. A couple of my 'studio supervisors' can be seen checking my progress. I generally don't need to block the things I crochet, but given the size, I thought I should this time. I accomplished that using some shish kabob skewers and my back yard.

For Stain 36, I ended up using acrylic spray paint instead of acrylic from a tube. I hadn't had much experience using spray paint in general and wasn't sure if the product I found was going to work for my needs, so I ordered some colors and began making some test samples, which also gave me a feel for how to handle the spray paint. I was happy with the results, so ordered the colors for the actual mural and whipped up a couple more test pieces to see how the colors layered and what order I should spray colors in.

Feeling confident enough to proceed, I moved on to the actual mural.

After the paint dried, I went back and outlined sections to create the composition.

Finally, layers of gloss medium were applied and the work was installed on August 13th.
Rountree Gallery is referring to these murals as Wide Access Art (WAA). The intent with WAA is to have art on the building that is changed frequently (as far as murals go) and so Stain 36 will be viewable at it's current location for about a year and a half.