Willow Rector

Fibre is the poetry of the everyday. At once ubiquitous and sensuous, functional and ornamental, it surrounds us with the palpable beauty of waking dreams. Through the art of needlepainting, I have explored the complex relationship between visual and literary art. My ongoing body of work, entitled “Handing on History,” is a creative visualization of questions concerning the resonance between women’s art history, their lives, and the cultural value of their art. While the emotional undercurrents of the creative process focused my first body of work, in 2010 I became fascinated by the relationship between the disciplines of biography and portraiture. This is reflected in “Blue,” a pictorial biography in which the story of an artist’s life is told through the images of the art created during that life.Currently, I am engaged with questions surrounding autobiography. “Untitled Landscape” (2011) is an abstract representation of subjectivity, specifically the relationship between the female body, desire, and the prairie landscape.