1st Place, Professional Mixed Media
The Linda Calsing Award

This is a companion piece to Walking the Water’s Edge, a Florentine design of waves on a beach. Participating in a beach cleanup in Hawaii showed me the devastation that trash causes to beautiful beaches. With this in mind, I reimagined the original piece. I stitched the same (mathematical patterned) edge of the wave on perforated paper, using plastic thread made by cutting up white and blue plastic bags. Eyelets make the foam, this time with dental floss and tape. On the other edge of this piece, I created the shrub/ground plants that grow on the beach using blackwork patterns and dimensional stitching: needle weaving, Casalguidi stitch, detached buttonhole, bullion knots. In those bushes and plants, I included items exemplifying the kind of debris, both plastic and rope, that gets tossed on the beach. Wrapped washers represent tires; bugle beads indicate straws; braided threads are ropes; dyed cheesecloth for netting.