What is the Gray Matter Series?
As an artist, fashion designer, producer, and Creative Guidance Counselor, one of the most significant art forms in my career is that of collaboration.
Everything I do is a vehicle for collaboration, sharing new ideas, and building community. And each installment is a step closer to discovering who I am as an artist and professional, and encouraging my collaborators to do the same.
The following is a recollection of the circuitous path I have taken through each of these projects- I would recommend clicking through the links for more information on the collaborators as they are INHERENT to my process. The deal is, I would end up writing a book if I shared the full process- let this be an introduction and I welcome you to investigate on the Gray Matter Site further.
The Gray Matter Series began as an idea in the summer of 2016. I was in Australia for a millinery conference. This was the same week as the Philando Castile shooting, and I watched from the other side of the planet as the polarity unfolded. “How can this be? Is it not clear? Are we destined to see everything in black and white?” I asked myself as I worked the grey felt in my class that day. I could not have known how much more difficult things would get, nor how much we would all process as rise up in the coming years.
One year after this, that grey headdress I started in Australia quietly launched the Gray Matter Series at the 58th Annual Midwestern at the Rourke Art Museum. Looking back on it, it was a statement of a need for shifting our perceptions and looking at things in new ways, but in ways that are unique to our own perceptions. I knew of course that sewing one of my headdresses onto a painting would not change a damn thing. It was more about shifting something in order to just do ONE thing different, and possibly confuse folks enough into asking questions.
The Gray Matter Series officially launched with the Fall 2017 collection of gray hats and colorful abstract paintings. We worked with the Hewing Hotel in Minneapolis to create a pop-up gallery shop during Fashion Week MN, working to elevate my and others’ designs and creative work to art from mere product.
The individual artistic investigation grew to a 50-piece painting as a statement on the limitations of the Scandanavian Law of Jante, which asked others to see themselves in new ways in order to connect more meaningfully with their communities.
The same Spring of 2018, we launched another collaborative collection which investigated the impact a Sense of Place on each of us, inspired by the idea that the energy and history of a landscape could have an impact on how our creativity moves through us.
Just a few months later, with fall on the horizon, I came out with the Gray Matter Series: Sense of Self collection- which was an investigation on the need for deep meaningful connections as we deal with the disintegration of self in times of stress- what some may call the Heroine’s Journey.
One of the most profound things I realized through this process over a few years was the universality of self doubt and anxiety in the creative process, which led me to see us all as more connected than we could realize. I dove into this and created a workshop “Building Your Body of Work” that launched in person in both Fargo, ND and Minneapolis, MN shortly after the “Gray Matter Series: Body of Work” collaboration launched, utilizing some new millinery and printing techniques.
Whew! There is a lot here and I have not even started talking about Gray Matter Series: Mother Trees yet. Mother Trees is a collaboration four years in the making and I am excited to share it with you. It definitely feels like a culmination of the work I truly love doing.
