I began stitching plastic bags while living in Greece. When i returned to the states, I had been working on nuestra señora de plástico for nearly 2 years. Josh Addison of bell arts factory coincided with me while i was enlarging the dress pattern (x70) in a blueprint printer at kinko’s and asked me what I was up to. Hard to explain i said. I’d been swimming in plastic for so long at that point. Oh! An art project, he said, then generously invited me to complete the project in the community room at bell arts.

When ceiling height became an issue, i gave josh a ring and quickly relocated. eventually my quiet return to the neighborhood was noticed; acknowledgement Of my former years of arts activism in the Ventura westside community resulted in my receiving a one-year studio residency at Bell arts. In that residency, i created 3 more installation/projects made of hand-stitched plastic bags.

nuestra señora de plástico

was inspired by a rumi poem which urged: start a huge, foolish project, like Noah; it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you. A monument to decadence and doom, i chose to create a baroque style dress, imagining the excess of plastic bags at the time would one day be an outlawed “omg … remember when.” The ghostly, decapitated quality of the hollow dress hung from the ceiling was an unplanned bonus.

a house for winter

was a tribute to the introspection of off-seasons spent on Paros. The elements, the inevitable banter with emptiness and shadow, the exploration of loneliness.

a quilt for my father’s ashes

was a tree of life cross-stitch quilt kit that I found at my grandmother’s house. I changed the colors and quilted the piece between plastic. My grandmother was a hoarder and wanted to preserve everything, the irony being that in hoarding, nothing is actually tended. My father died during the year of my residency. He had been an arborist. The reverse of the quilt features graphite imagery.

waiting for Aphrodite / the bed of roses

was my final installation and thank you to bell arts factory, formerly bell mattress factory. The bed of roses was made of hand stitched plastic bags collected on height street, around the corner from my cousin’s flat on ashbury street. It was about waiting for a notoriously late boyfriend, learning different cultural ways of time-keeping and becoming entranced by the play of light and shadow on the curtain that hung in my open doorway. The floor littered with my poems addressed to Aphrodite.

Within a year of my plastic period, use of plastic bags for sacking groceries was banned in San Francisco, and elsewhere.