Since my earliest years, I've stood in many worlds, not indigenous anywhere yet, chameleon-like, adapting everywhere. My life began along the Adriatic Sea, with childhood summers later spent at the Atlantic Ocean. I was educated on the east and west coasts of the U.S. I've lived in the Andes, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Hawaiian Islands, and traversed much of Latin America, Europe, Asia, southern Africa, New Zealand, and beyond. I now alternate between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Mendonoma coast, where the Pacific Ocean has a major impact on my daily sensory experience.
Natural environments, East Asian aesthetics, the places I've lived and traveled, 20th-century abstract art, and my meditation practice are the most important influences and inspirations for my art.
As a long-time writer and editor, I've used words to convey ideas and emotions to others. Now I also communicate with fibers because it's exhilarating to engage with color, texture, line, shape and space, pattern and design. I'm fascinated by how textiles have been central to human life since earliest times. They play a universal role in celebrating beauty and imparting feelings, in telling stories about the cultures that create them and marking stages of the life cycle as well as expressing the relationship people have to their environment.
I approach the creative process as an open-ended improvisation. Pieces emerge intuitively, even serendipitously. Because I generally don’t sketch ahead of time, I gradually feel my way into each piece, choosing this color or that textile, dyeing cloth with indigo or rust, incorporating paper, metal or wood, cutting a shape or adding another layer for transparency, working up texture, selecting a thread, stitching another mark or brushing on paint or ink. Along the way, I embrace and celebrate the surprises.
For more about Mirka, click Professional Information.