Embroidery on printed fabric, 2021

Embroidery on hand dyed wool felt

After reading a biography of the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker this past summer I decided to plant a garden using flowers that appeared in her paintings or that she mentioned in her writing, then document it. So, in preparation I spent a lot of time looking at her work. It wasn’t always easy to identify the plants but the “Old Woman in the Garden” was most certainly holding a foxglove, so I planted it, among many others, sometimes just guessing what the flower depicted might be. As a gardener, I should have anticipated the difficulty of using nature as a collaborator. Almost nothing turned out as I expected. Unpredictable weather, rampant weeds, and hungry insects all insisted on altering my attempts.