Barnacles & Sea Flowers
Chenille stems (plaiting, twining)
Up on the Porch Roof, Portland, ME
Woven from ordinary chenille stems, this small series of vessels turns a humble craft material into something geological and organic. Coiled row by row, each piece builds a dense, fuzzy shell — texture reading as fur, moss, or eroded stone depending on the light. The material is interesting because it doesn’t “bounce back” or have a “memory” like other weaving materials. The wire at the core of the stem holds whatever position or form you, the weaver, give it.
The white pods with red-lined openings suggest seed casings or coral polyps split open; their black-and-white counterparts feel more animal, like paws or lined nests. The yellow pieces push furthest from the vessel form, loose stem-ends bursting upward like unruly stamens.
Together, the pieces form an imagined library of specimens — objects that feel collected rather than made, each one a small taxonomy of color, opening, and gesture built from a material usually associated with children's crafts and pipe-and-tobacco stores. By repeating a single humble technique across variations in scale and palette, the work asks what happens when patience and repetition are applied to something disposable: the ordinary chenille stem, wound tightly enough, becomes strange, organic, and worth a second look.
