Rachelle Gardner-Roe

Whether I work with thread and wool, resin, or works on paper, drawing is often the primary act.  I want people to be able to connect to my work on a basic, physical level no matter how complex my processes become. As children, whether we color inside the lines or are told off for seeing walls as ready-made canvases, drawing is one of the first, primal acts of creating. As such, I keep drawing close to my heart and practice, while exploring what it can look in nontraditional methods and materials. I use a sewing machine to draw with thread in my textile work and my current sculptural work utilizes a 3D printing pen to create dimensional lacework. This melding of drawing and sculpture with textiles is also a means of recontextualizing “women’s work” through blending historical craft and the generational passing down of knowledge with contemporary practice.

I am influenced by psychology and the sense of self or consciousness. Recently, I have explored the psychological armor we build in order to protect our inner world and interface with the exterior world. Memory has also been a major influence across bodies of work due to its role in defining self while also being inherently fragmented and malleable. Another important influence that pervades my practice is my Midwestern rural roots. I seek to celebrate a kind of regionalism and my textile work manifests this by using hand-dyed wools from sheep on the family farm. It is additionally meaningful that it is not only my own labor that goes into the work, but also the time and energy of another generation that helped make that material possible. It is this sense of place and the land that bore me that keeps me grounded wherever my material and conceptual explorations take my practice.