First Friday's Opening Night Lake Duerksen

Weaving for me is a restless need. A nightly meditation, the loom is an embodiment of

existential unrest, tension and release. Using natural fibers and muted earth tones, I seek

to depict the harmony between the sublime and the ruined. To glean from arcane fields

the beauty that flourishes from woe, solitude, and destitution.

I know the realm where my art is formed as the Musk Fields. A place of clear duality,

a vast plane of glowing dried grass where vestige embraces. Laying down flesh to dirt,

the ground smelling of blood, rain and warmth, one is filled with dread. Bare trees claw

at dim skies, their dried leaves now debris returning to the soil from which they were

birthed. One finds themselves filled with gratitude. Musk Fields is a tattered womb that

remains throbbing, yet everything is decaying. A land cloaked in an aura of bliss only

obtained by enduring trails of pain. Everything is rapturous. My weavings are glimpses of

this land, a synthesis of the pangs of the Dunya.

Self taught, I was drawn to weaving because of its tedious and restrictive nature.

Weaving constrains one to the horizontal and the vertical. It relies on a precise tension.

There is sedulous care in every cementer woven, and a profound sweetness found in labor

fraught by submission.

In the future, I hope to rove deeper into the dry grass and damp dirt of the Musk Fields.

To capture the soft ache of existence. Though I try, its true form still alludes me. For now,

I meditate on life’s fragility. How my own body along with my weavings are flourishing,

waning, & perishing. From dust we are shaped to forms of fiber and flesh, only to be

unbound and stripped by the tides of existence. Surely to dust we all return.