Environmental Embroidery with Hillary Wa...

Hillary Waters Fayle is an artist and Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she directs the fiber/textile program. She has taught embroidery and textile workshops around the world and is an alumna of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation's Artist Residency Program. Her work is in the permanent collections of the AKG Museum in Buffalo, NY, Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, CT, the United States Embassy to Sri Lanka, Colombo, the Kalmthout Arboretum & Botanical Gardens in Belgium and is on view at the US Embassies in Algiers, Algeria and Dhaka, Bangladesh. Recent professional projects and publications include collaborations with Domestika, L'Occitane en Provance and the New York Botanical Garden.

"My work brings together materials and processes that express the union of humanity and the physical world, most often textile traditions in collaboration with botanical material. The deep historical and lived experience we have with cloth echoes our connection to the botany all around us-both are entwined with our evolution and survival, and they are now so completely integrated into our lives, that they become nearly invisible. Both flora and cloth represent powerful and symbolic connections to place, time, people and our past. Whether stitching, drawing, planting seeds, or harvesting, my hands echo the gestures made by thousands of hands over thousands of years and I feel connected to the lineage of people working with textiles, plants and the land. Stitching, like horticulture, can be functional-- a technical solution to join materials/a means of survival-- or, both can be done purely in service of the soul, lifting the spirit through beauty and wonder."

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