The Sense of Place Collection 2022

The Sense of Place collection is a series of thirteen woven landscapes infused with wonder for the places that impact and inform our identities, experiences, and memories.

Aurora Borealis I

What Sense of Place Means

I was an English Literature and Writing major in college. In writing workshop classes, if the the writer did a good job of bringing the “where” of a story/poem/essay to life, the professor or peer reviewer might write in the margins “a good sense of place.”

This note was one I got often. My poems were quite often about place, and I’ve found that in my adult life, my place is sort of the thread that ties my narrative together. I often use place in my art—writing and now weaving—but more than that, where I live and my surroundings are a big part of my identity. I’ve used moving—changing place—in the past when I felt stuck or scared or uncertain. I wanted a new place to help make me into a new person, and in many ways, it has. Moving to northern Minnesota brought with it a sense of purpose and direction when it facilitated my discovery of weaving.

The Sense of Place Collection was made to capture the feeling of those moments when our surroundings hold us captive.

For these first three months of 2022 during a rather intense winter in northern Minnesota, it was a gift to be able to pour my energy, heart, and creativity into these pieces. Exploring new design elements such as trees and aurora borealis (northern lights), I truly stretched and challenged myself with the level of detail in these weavings.

Cove

I hiked to Magnetic Rock with friends to better capture the wintry, grayscale landscape. I visited my favorite cove on Lake Superior, the one I can easily walk to and thus the one I visit most often. I looked back in my photo archives of the past five years living in the Grand Marais, MN area and found shorelines, palisades, starry nights, rugged white pines, wild ice, turquoise summer waters, winter sunsets. I pulled from this archive of my memories to create what you see in this collection.

While some of the weavings depict a specific place, others are more abstract, but they all capture a universal human experience—moments where our surroundings hold us captive.

Standing on the shore of a body of water watching the sunset. Hiking to the edge of a canyon. Or just getting out of your car at night and happening to look up and notice a sky of brilliant stars above that stops you short and takes your breath away.

We have all experienced these moments of amazement in different forms, some as the backdrop to major life events and others where the view or moment itself is the event in an otherwise uneventful day.

These 13 weavings are a celebration of that universal amazement and an invitation to experience our surroundings more deeply every day.