Embedded Summer Bloom, Woad 1

An abundance of summer blooms remember a story of place through the color they produce. In her newest series, Embedded Summer Bloom, Gregory is thinking about place and landscape. This series uses Black Eyed Susan, Woad, Indigo, Sappanwood and Marigold grown and gathered from her dye garden and dyed on silk and cotton. Gregory situates her studio practice at the intersection of textile and architecture. If the nature of architecture is fixed and permanent, then the opposite would be a textile, collapsible and movable. Further consideration would show more common links than differences. Both mediums define space, create shelter and allow privacy; a textile however, has the advantage of flexibility. It is a semi two-dimensional plane that has the ability to fold, drape, move and change to its surroundings. Her work uses cloth construction as a fundamental center, a place to start from and move back to. With a background in weaving, Gregory sees herself as a builder — drawing clear connections between the lines of thread laid perpendicularly through a warp and the construction of architectural spaces. The work materializes through a variety of mediums all traced back to the line of a thread. She creates handwoven textiles that she pairs with architectural materials such as concrete. She is interested in understanding her studio practice as an object of labor in a constant state of becoming, something that is pliable and alive.