Research

As a researcher, writer, and experimenter in the boundary spaces of materiality, I seek to juxtapose meditations on place and its material manifestations alongside ephemeral memory and human production of meaning tied to place. I am fascinated by human modes of taking measure of the planet - be it through various forms of mapping, categorizing, or myth and other narrative. I do not argue, but rather submerge (as a former institutional academic, now independent researcher and prototyper/designer). I construct my worldview of garments as interfaces with the natural world, and as artifacts of natural/cultural intertwining through the lens of various philosophies of place-making, and of being in reciprocity with the non-human, alongside thinkers Anna Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna Haraway, and Stefan Helmreich, to name a few. My research and garment creating is inspired by place - recently, Marble Creek and the Saint Francis River in Southeast Missouri - and influened by designers & thinkers such as Giullia Tomasello, Lizan Freijsen, & TômTex.

Focuses: Haptic perception in garment studies, textile as porous interfacing, human/other-than-human interaction, boundary layers of the human microbiome, philosophies of moss & lichen, garment industry sustainability practices.

Research Mission

To transform the reader and wearer's relationship to the textile they wear, its origins, and its shaping of perception of the modern environment - particularly highlighting the boundary layers, and porousness, of human and non-human interfacing.

While most garments are physically opaque, absorbing of light, tangible and material, my writing paired with my garments seeks to re-orient the garment-wearer as though they are wrapped in transluscency - to re-formulate their garment as a lens for not simply viewing, but sensing and knowing: to write textile and garment as a means of receiving the environment.

Research Methods
(academy & studio)

My research seeks to translate meditations on human/non-human interfacing and render them tangible through the construction of unique garments. These garments, in their development, disrupt the extractive demands of current economic systems of commodity exchange through their individuality, and largely through my reading-driven process of translating philosophical literature into wearable-lenses. Thus, my methods begin with both readings & papers I was assigned in my graduate studies in Critical Studies in Art & Culture, particularly a Contemporary Art Seminar taught by Sven Luticken, and Environmental Humanities at Vrij Universiteit, Amsterdam. After the pandemic interrupted my studies, I found myself home in Missouri with a tremendous amount of time to revisit those course readings, which I read aloud to my dog, Bear, throughout the winter and spring of 2021. I built a studio in my grandmother's basement and fretted over how best to purchase textiles. My entire development of the Illegible collection, and all of the research that has informed it, has been a constant and muddled fretting over this question of textile waste. Bear makes a point of laying on top of every garment I cut a pattern for when I am working on the ground (constant).

Research Methods
(field work)

As previously mentioned, a great deal of my processing of the readings that collected to shape my present research happened in reading out loud to my dog Bear in the cold early months of 2021. Reading most of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Mushroom at the End of the World out loud to her directly shaped how it has felt to be out in the world with her since. Excursions to Rend Lake in Southwest Illinois, to the creek behind my mother's house in Saint Louis, to the woods of Wisconsin where my grandmother grew old writing poetry and novels on ancestry and land, have all been explicitly at play in what my other-than-human other-half and I can produce in terms of meaning in exploring place together through smell and touch. I cannot recall these memories without feeling overwhelming one-ness with Bear, and Bear with place. More on this to come, as traditional descriptions of field work feel relevant to revisit here while I meditate on my time in the world, permeated by these texts in my thinking.

Research Output

My research lives thus far in the epherma of the internet and my studio, as written testimony to my thinking's submersion within the meaning-making of the writers I mention above. My research lives in the decaying, or upgraded, or unravelled and deconstructed garments that such meditations on place and meaning, touch-points and interfaces with the world, inspired. Sven Luticken described my approach to a paper on Future Flora by Giulia Tomasello as using the design as 'a stumbling block' to exploring the universes Yuk Hui, James Lovelock, and Elizabeth Povinelli produce in their writing. I like to think of the garments from the Illegible collection as these same stumbling blocks that I have teased out and into the material world from the books stacked on my coffee table in my studio. I am still struggling with how to record and upload my production process for these prototypes. It is difficult to leave garments in a state of on-going work, which feels much more natural to me in writing - to stay open-ended. But open-ended garments are, indeed, the goal of the work, and from the images I have thus far of the garments themselves, the not-yet-finished spaces of the works are the work living and breathing alongside my written work. What a final presentation of this research accumulates as, I do not yet know.

The illegible collection lives here, while I try to bring her into living into more than just my world/studio/brain.

My graduate writing work is also available here.