With textiles, embroidery, whittling, ceramics, collage, photography and 3D printing, HomeEc references the domestic realm in concept and craft. The participating artists hail from Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and New York and contribute a variety of unique considerations of home, domesticity, privacy, tradition, belonging and displacement.

Ceramicist Summer Carmack evokes the tradition of afternoon tea, while Nick DeFord gently rebels against traditional notions of the home front in embroidery and image. Joe Ford's 3D printed cul-de-sac addresses privacy and surveillance. Paul Loughney's collages of floating millwork and destabilized architectural detail face Cara Sullivan's photographs of burnt interiors. Jenna Richards presents ghostly ceramic shells of folded garments - memorials to time and care - while Rowan Haug's paper quilt top floats on ambient air flow suggesting clothes drying on the line. A second work by Sullivan documents a performance in which she mimics the catnap and the charming collection of hand whittled spoons by Marty Haug deliver both a variety and unity of form.

Nick DeFord / Artist Statement:

My work explores the visual culture of cartography, occult imagery, geographical souvenirs, and other structures of information that is altered to examine the relationship of identity, space, and place. The disruption of these visual systems reveals a thin boundary between the known and unknown. The repetitive hand-mechanical process used in stitching and layering gives the work an added inference of compulsivity, craft, and concern. The additive processes and materials tie the work to familiar classrooms, offices, and homes where information is routinely organized and understood.

The embroidery needle cuts through the surfaces of ephemeral objects and alters the original structure of information in a physical and hybrid transformation. In order to examine that sutured boundary between the known and unknown, I select for subject matter places and themes that are infamous for their mystery. These mysterious themes may be the habitation of monsters, centers of conspiracy, occult devices, or vortices of mysticism. Strange locales, threatening in their otherness, provide stark contrast to the comfort and security of home. Anxiety increases when we realize that the physical world, in its infiniteness of space and time, borders the unexplored and unexplainable.

We understand ourselves by naming and categorizing, and mapping is a common method of understanding not only personal location but also personal identity. My work questions the efficacy of that process, the delicacy of the known world, and a re-identification within viewers of a sense of place and the unknown.