A Stew of Materials

My graduate school committee chair and mentor, Susie Ganch, artist, professor and head of the metal area at Virginia Commonwealth University, encouraged me to think about making as if I were making a stew: put things together and see what happens. Don’t be afraid to mix. Let the ingredients meet, mingle, change one another.

I began to think about materials this way — not as separate voices, but as ingredients in a larger conversation.

A piece of wood beside textile and a scrap of metal. Cloth meeting paper. Thread crossing a surface. Wax sinking into, covering, revealing, or transforming what came before. Each material arrives with its own history, texture, weight, resistance, and language. Alone, each has a voice. Together, something else begins to emerge.

Like a good stew, the whole becomes more than its individual parts. Ingredients soften into one another. Flavors deepen. Boundaries blur. What was once recognizable becomes something new.

In mixed media, I am interested in that transformation — the moment when materials stop simply occupying the same space and begin to speak to one another. Their differences create tension, their similarities create harmony, and somewhere between the two, a new visual language begins to form.

The materials remain themselves, but they also become something else.

Separate voices become a chorus.
The chorus becomes a single voice.
And the stew becomes something that could not have existed before the ingredients came together.