I have become increasingly interested in making as an alternative form of sketching. Working with physical materials creates opportunities to explore form, texture, structure, and spatial relationships through a process that is slower and more tactile than working digitally. In particular, I have been interested in how fiber arts can be used to think about space in three dimensions.

Every Tuesday evening, a family gathers around the same dining table. The floor plan hasn’t changed in years, but the room is different every week. The walls remain where they’ve always been, although the paint color changes every few years. There’s a small dent at the bottom of the wall from the time 7 years ago when you and your sister got roller skates for Christmas. You didn’t tell your dad about the dent until he discovered it randomly last year.

A fictional story can describe an event that never happened and a person who never existed, yet still make us recognize something familiar. We can see ourselves in characters we have never met and understand experiences we have never had. Fiction often gives us a way to think about things that are difficult to articulate directly. Fiction is not reality, but it can still tell us something true about reality.