Feeding Chickens

In the late 70's and early 80's, I made a series of soft sculpture dolls and their household appliances. A variety of housewives had a shopping cart, a refrigerator, a stove, a washing machine and a Hoover style vacuum cleaner, all sewn with fabric and found objects. Even though the dolls were well received, I got the impression that they were seen as just dolls and certainly not art. That's when I got the idea to transfer my ideas and methods into a relief format that retained the 3-dimensional qualities of my soft sculptures. I presumed that if you put almost anything in a frame and hung it up, it was perceived differently and may even be considered "art". I experimented with fabric backgrounds and raised embroidered parts, creating scenes that were presented under glass in shadow box frames. Although I was influenced by 17th century stumpwork embroidery, the homely and old fashioned name wasn't fitting, so I coined the term "fabric relief" to describe what I was doing.