When I was pregnant with my first child, a male colleague joked, "you aren't going to start making baby art now, are you?" I laughed, and hoped that would be a socially acceptable response, rather than the shocked indignation that I would have preferred to display. The truth is, my art work comes from my own life experiences, and all of the aspects of being a woman in our society are part of that.

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The Gather and Disperse Quilt is a quilt embedded with video, and it makes metaphoric and literal play with the idea of “gathering in” and “dispersing out.” The videos in the quilt explore some of the instinctive behaviors of parenting, including lactation, baby-wearing, and a baby's sampling of native flora. The quilt is also a literal play with the idea of gathering and dispersing -- several of the panels are devoted to “samplers” of textures created using different types of gathers, and the videos in two panels show the motion of gathering and ungathering fabric.