Through reclaiming natural, mundane, and ceremonial found materials, Lydia creates a spacious symbology surrounding themes of care, preservation, and the immaterial connection that continues with those passed on. The works are a personal record of her own and others’ losses and transformations, becoming a connective force. Her work has led her to forage in dumpsters, highways, farms, compost piles, apothecaries, free boxes, fabric stores, and florist shops. Her practice is an autonomous process of meaning-making for experiences in life beyond language. Though many of these hand sewn pieces mimic lofty religious reliquaries and stained glass, they are created with the ethos and closeness of a quilting bee. Through the careful hand sewing of objects and natural ephemera between layers of vinyl, her work considers the process by which objects become sacred or sentimental. Influenced by Western mysticism, memorialization, quilting traditions, and rose gardens, objects become words and the works exist as visual poems. These works embody multiple translations or transformations; from emotion to language, language to material, and material back to emotion.
Lydia has been an artist-in-residence at the Corporation of Yaddo, Champlain College, Vermont Studio Center, the Lab Program in Mexico City, and AS220. She lives, works, and receives many of her materials in Burlington, Vermont.
Through a Mended Portal an essay by Rachel Jones