Heron’s Realm
Heron’s Realm is an on-going series that speaks simultaneously to the exquisite beauty of the Albemarle Sound in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and to the environmental precariousness I am facing here at the water’s edge. This body of work draws on various techniques to translate into fiber art these different aspects of the coast. One bird dominates this landscape in my imaginary: the grey heron. Whenever I see one fishing, relaxing, or flying away, I am in awe of its awkward beauty.
A number of these works blend beauty with deterioration in my art’s very fabric, as the images—printed on chiffon—are torn before being layered on backgrounds that I have created through mono-printing and abstract painting. Layering—hiding and revealing—generates diverse textures, obscuring the images or revealing their subjects. The images themselves digitally merge the cloth that I create with photographs I take in this region.
Heron’s Realm: A Triptych
20 x 20 x 1.5 inches; 36 x 24 x 1.5 inches; 20 x 20 x 1.5 inches
This piece anchors the series. The left panel captures the grasses of the shoreline and the colors of an overcast morning; the middle panel melds the days of late winter as the heron stalks its increasingly unsafe environment endangered by recent road construction and jet-ski traffic; the right one presents a visual echo of a live oak next to our house which is slowly dying in the rising sea. The right panel has led to a new series, Requiem for a Tree.
Herons
Whenever I go to other source photographs for work in this series, I return to this particular image that I took on a cold February morning (the time stamp says 7:09 am) that frames the bird between man-made wave breakers, the reeds at the water’s edge, and the area of sea grasses revealed by the low tide. There is something about the bird’s alertness that speaks to me and that has me return over and over again to this particular image. Stitch serves to repair and bind together the textures and layers of these pieces.
Heron #3
16 x 16 x 0.75 inches
Heron #4
15 x 20.5 inches