Tracy Fehr

I have been drawing since I was three years old on the walls of our back porch, murals on friends playroom walls and whatever paper I could get my hands on. I don’t know how many pieces of paper have been turned into swirling matrices of ink depicting faces and figures over my life time or how many warnings I got from teachers to stay in the lines. I do know that this compulsion to draw gets expressed whenever and however it can. This most recent work has taken shape on cloth and my drawing materials have been primarily thread. My instincts as a mother, creator-artist are intertwined and executed on fabric in these tapestry inspired portraits.In these mixed media compositions I am exploring unconscious emotions, tensions and intimate relationships (mother/child, sibling/sibling, observer/observed) using the context of dreams and sleeping figures where hidden dangers are expressed in symbols and colours. The sense of impending danger is juxtaposed against innocence and communicated in the softness of fabric, soothing patterns, and intricately embroidered and tapestry-like stitching. This has allowed me to express myself in a language that is diverse visually, conceptually and texturally.