Donate Fabrics / Materials

I am always looking for — and grateful for — donations of materials and fabrics to my large-scale projects.  I couldn’t survive as an artist without them, my scale being such that even buying things at Goodwill adds up in a scary way.  Solstenen has no material budget at this point.

Do you have any gray or silver fabrics, clothes, ribbons, thread, yarn, beads or buttons?

I would particularly love to work with fabrics that are past their reuse value (those old t-shirts you can’t get rid of, give them a new life).  Come on by The Project Room during open studio hours or an event, and I will gratefully add your fibers into the mix.

As an artist, one of the things I do that brings me the most pleasure is transforming the discarded into something fantastic, especially the challenge of things like old towels and t-shirts.  On some level, this is at the heart of much that I do as an artist, trying to make a connection between the ordinary and the sublime, the process of transformation from one to the other.

I also have this weird, very vivid ability to remember where every piece of fabric came from, it fans out in my mind like a deck of cards.  I enjoy remembering friends when I use some tid-bit from their life they wanted to get rid of.  I often ponder about the idea of reinvesting objects with meaning and value; and the very real ability everything has of loosing meaning.  Objects aren’t store-houses of memory, we are…and sometimes that slips away.  In my hoarding and digging through discarded this-and-that, I sometimes come across something that seems like it must have been of great emotional value, and I wish I could know more, but I can’t…it’s gone.  Our intense emotions are ephemeral, we try our best to imbibe objects with them to hang on to them (we make art, we make scrap books, we make quilts for babies, we make saintly relics and sacred texts).  I like the process of the slippage of value and meaning through my hands; for a bit while I am making things, I seem to have a handle on it.  But finished work seems to slip back into a clattering of voices and desires from all sides, pushed and pulled.  I’ve done my best to imbibe a bit of me into the bits of fabrics, to put dormant things back into the flux of life.  Wait..what….how did I get here?  I was just asking for your old t-shirts and now I’m onto flux of life?

Anyhow, your donation of anything, whether random, weird, old, worn out, I am grateful, and I will think of you when I cut it up, rip it to shreds and make something mind-blowing.  Now get to the garage and clean out some boxes.