Allison Watkins

Artist Statement:

UNFOLDINGS

Wanting to capture the transitional nature of clothing throughout our lives I drew and embroidered my closet from photographs. The clothing would come and go and I would always have this documentation of the way it once was. Through the trace and embroidery the garments became flat and unrecognizable- no longer functional, yet still tactile- between spaces, where it is unclear if the garment is deteriorating with time, or in the process of being created. I view these spaces as floating simulations between the photograph and three-dimensional garment. I have been documenting my closet through embroidery for the past couple of years.

I am an interdisciplinary artist and arts educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I received my BFA at San Jose State University and an MFA at San Francisco State University.  Currrently, I am working on a series I call Unfoldings.  These extremely time intensive, hand-stitched “thread drawings” of clothing (closets, piles of clothes, folded clothes) have been my meditations for the past two years, and they are a larger part of a series of projects I have been working on since 2005, exploring the nature of personal objects. I consider this series to be an excavation and retracing of the past, and I am interested in how we relate to, and mark the passage of time through possessions and places that are now gone. Recently these works have been  included in exhibitions at The Textile Art Center in Brooklyn, New York, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland, CA and the San Francisco Zen Center in San Francisco, CA. I have been an artist in residence at Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain, and the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am a recent grantee of the Helene Wurtlitzer Foundation and will be an artist in residenve in Taos, NM in late 2012.