I am a weaver, painter, and teacher who combines traditional techniques with improvisation, drawing new and different stories from thread and cloth with each piece I make.

My journey into textiles began nearly two decades ago with the creation of one-of-a-kind handwoven backpacks. What we carry tells a story, and these backpacks became vessels of connection, linking people through color, touch, and time. Each one was handwoven and hand-stitched, designed to be both functional and deeply personal. Over time, this series, Woven to Carry, grew into a meditation on what it means to hold and be held by the things we make. What began as a practical object slowly evolved into a practice of creating complex, intimate works of wearable art.

Devoted to a daily art practice, I create weavings and paintings layered with stories and symbols, each inspired by the natural world and by the long thread connecting ancestral blankets to the work I make today. Whether people share a language or not, woven cloth holds history.

Weaving itself is a language, one almost as old as time. It has always been a way to bridge cultures, to share lived experience, and to learn from one another’s histories. Patiently, I build upon traditions that honor my love of European-American coverlet patterns and fine-detailed sampler embroideries. Mixed with my own inventions, techniques, and color choices, each piece takes on a life of its own, forming meaning as fragments are joined into a new whole.

Acts of reciprocity and cross-cultural exchange continue to shape my practice. Learning from others within my two homes, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Marshall, North Carolina, keeps my passion for weaving alive. These places, distinct yet deeply intertwined, both hold rich craft traditions that shape my sense of rhythm, color, and belonging. At the loom each day, I move slowly and methodically through the rainbow of wool yarns at hand, allowing feeling and experience to guide the process. Those emotions are recorded directly into the cloth, row by row. When I finally unfurl the weaving from the loom and pin it alongside pieces made over the years, a conversation begins, older works finding their way into newer ones until the composition feels whole.

My work bridges these geographies and the legacies they hold, weaving together the Scandinavian-influenced patterns of the Upper Midwest with the handwoven histories of the Appalachian South. Through weaving, I seek to honor inherited knowledge while creating space for new stories, where color and pattern become a form of emotional and cultural translation.

As I move forward, I seek to connect with weavers and textile traditions from around the world, finding kinship through our shared reverence for cloth and the stories it carries within culture. In essence, the work, built from all its bits and pieces, is the making of my life.