2015 Bridges Conference

JONI MARIE DAVIS

Artists

JONI MARIE DAVIS

ARTIST

ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA, USA

groveparkfullery@gmail.com

http://www.jonimariedavis.com

Statement

I work with wool. I make "skins" for a variety of forms using wool fabric. In this multi-step process, I am by turns a scrounger, a designer, a geometer, a knitter, a fuller, a colorist, and a sewist. The end result seems to be a blend of textile art and sculpture. I include both deliberate order and randomness, serendipity, even chaos, in every piece: I make rules for a design, and then I break them selectively; I draft a motif pattern precisely, knowing full well that the medium will never be able to live up to that precision. Whether I am crafting a useful object or dreaming up a figure to embody an idea, I always pull in vibrant color, playfulness, surprise, and beauty in pattern and form.

Artworks

Image for entry 'My Fuzzy Voronoi'

My Fuzzy Voronoi

55 x 55 x 55 cm

Fiber

2015

The piece renders a Voronoi diagram, partitioning the surface of a sphere, using textiles. I love mosaics and tile work, so I'm always looking at tessellations. I was fascinated by the idea of a "pattern" beginning with random points. In the piece, each cell is represented by a fulled wool tile; I stitched the tiles together to fit snugly on the ball. I made the fabric on vintage knitting machines with sheep's wool yarn. After fulling, I cut and hand-dyed each fabric tile with acid dyes. The seeds of the Voronoi spaces are represented by appliquéd fabric discs. I used Delaunay triangulation method, and it is depicted with stitching worked in metallic threads. The partition imposes order on the random points and semi-chaotic coloring.