Held in Common: Purple
In 2019, four members of the Hana Kark Collective—encaustic artist Caryl St. Ama, painter Margaret Lazzari, mixed-media artist Nancy Kay Turner, and I—embarked on a collaborative abstract art project using color as a unifying framework. Known as Chromatic Collaboration, we each worked independently to create 25 mixed-media artwork panels (6” x 6” each) for every primary and secondary color across the spectrum. We started with blue, entering the project without a fixed outcome, curious where a shared palette and individual creative processes would lead. Our initial mid-process work debuted in September 2019.
Purple marked the final color in the series. While my Yellow series relied on full sheets of paper with layered cloth where narrative arcs unfolded across multi-panel diptychs and triptychs, Purple shifted my approach toward the direct power of found text. For this final installment of the series, I brought textual storytelling directly onto individual, focused textile art panels.
I began conceiving these fiber art pieces in October 2020 amid profound social, medical, and political upheaval. Throughout that summer, I felt a quiet pull to talk less and listen more—to step back rather than react. I needed space to observe, learn, and process, and the physical isolation of the pandemic provided the quiet required for deep personal reflection.
Returning to the aged, gessoed pages of my grandfather’s copy of The Story of the Irish Race—a historical volume I first explored in my Red series—I was struck by how deeply the vintage text echoed our contemporary moment. It offered a grounding sense of hope and perspective: a reminder that present turmoil eventually settles into the wisdom that only time, experience, and patience yield.
To construct each 6” x 6” piece, I pieced and overdyed scraps of industrial waste fabric, establishing rich violet, magenta, and plum textile collages. I appliquéd found words and phrases onto the surface and heavily embellished each composition with hand embroidery, beads, sequins, and lace. Sourced from disparate historical pages, the assembled fragments form intimate mini-narratives on every panel. One piece reads: “and then there were the women,” “the women had mirrors,” “and readily found reasons for refusal and delay.” Each completed textile collage is laminated to a 3/4” Baltic birch plywood panel, bridging fiber arts, fine art collage, and narrative storytelling into a unified small-scale installation.
