CHROMA: Orange

Beginning in 2019, encaustic artist Caryl St. Ama, painter Margaret Lazzari, mixed-media artist Nancy Kay Turner and I began a collaborative project using color as a commonality. As part of the Hana Kark Collective we each worked independently to create 25 birch plywood panels, 6” x 6” each, in each primary and secondary color. We started with blue, intending to work our way through the spectrum. Without a clear idea of how we would ultimately assemble the work, or where the process might lead us, we began. We had our first exhibitions of the work, mid-process, in September 2019.

Orange was the second color we worked on. As one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2019, I vowed to not purchase any new materials for art. Driven by the desire to create less waste and confident that, given the ginormous stash of fabrics, dyes, paints, and art supplies I had collected over the years, this would be an achievable goal. I decided to try out different hand embroidery stitches as I tend to get in a rut and keep using the few stitches I’m most comfortable using.

I used scraps of dyed indigo cloth, industrial waste fabrics, and offcuts from interior fabric headers. Fabrics are layered, stitched together by hand and machine, and embellished with block printing, painting, and stencils then embroidered with cotton and hand-dyed threads. The stitched pieces are finally laminated onto 3/4” baltic birch plywood.