September featured artist

Artist: Tanya Chappell

Title: Reconnecting memories
Medium: Textile Art

Location: Premier Art Supplies

Artist statement:

Drawing from my childhood memories and combining them with family images from the past, is the focus of my textile artwork. This is my way of reconnecting and remembering my grounding in life along with the values I have grown up with. It is a way of healing and a sense of placement in which I feel more secured and focused within myself.

With each passing of a family member, the connections to my childhood are slowly being severed, and an ever-growing need to preserve these memories become greater.

After finding a treasure trove of old negatives and photography’s in my childhood home, disintegrating, my aim was to restore them, as a way to reconnect and to preserve my family history.  Initially it was meant to help my sister’s and myself with their grief as a way of healing, but it has grown into something much stronger, as the feeling of displacement has been replaced with a sense of inner peace and direction.

Using textile art, I felt compelled to use these images within my work, but altered them to become more obscured and abstracted, using layered images that are cropped, to draw and hold the viewers attention while they work the images out.

My textile work involves a combination of using different materials, textures, layering of images together, hand and machine sewing, as well as hand painting the fabric. It is my way of paying homage to my mother, as she loved to sew.