Materials:
Textiles
Handmade Paper
Ceramics
Artist’s Statement:
My creative practice uses material transformation and craft practices to invite a moment of comfort and tactile reflection, while examining the unreliability of nostalgia. I employ tactile materials including handmade paper, textiles, and functional ceramic forms to reflect on memories of textures, tastes, plates of food, reuse, and ephemeral touch through crafted moments of material paradox. The fibers of my work are built from personal memories as a daughter of an Irish immigrant, cooked in American fantasy and instability. My work provides a space of tenderness, connection, and humor for the viewer, offering both respite and a farewell to the past. The playful forms and soft surfaces evoke earnestness and levity, while reflecting on the fallibility of established social structures and collective memory.
Recently my work has been following form after my craft research, much of it in resourcefulness, cultural weight of material, and class history. Responding to this research in the studio, I spin wool yarn, continue my exposed batting work, use handmade recycled textile paper as a drawing surface, and make handbuilt ceramic servingware. When making these objects I still consider material moments of respite. The pieces I make, while reminiscent of historic forms such as baskets, farm bells and recycled flour sacks, aim to quietly examine how we idealize near history. Even with this perspective, my craft work is a celebration of material alchemy and nourishment; while also holding a cheeky taste of questionable romanticism.
Artist Biography:
Muriel holds an MFA from University of Tennessee- Knoxville (‘22) and a BFA from Montana State University (‘16.) Between degrees, she assisted at Frogman’s Print Workshops in Omaha, NE and was a postgraduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. She has been awarded residencies with Print Arts Northwest (Portland, OR), Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland, and the Morgan Paper Conservatory (Cleveland, OH.) She has shown nationally and participated in many print exchanges, including organizing a fabric based quilt print exchange.
Muriel works and lives in Helena, MT creating work that dances between practicality and uselessness.
