Teri Blodgett

Portrait of Sarah

Dawn Southworth

To make her mixed media constructions Dawn Southworth employs a variety of materials and processes. Dawn joins fleeting scraps of cloth, wood, paper and metal into cohesive indicators of both a natural world and human presence. An inventory list of objects in her studio would include: battered fabrics, burnt ironing board covers, linen napkins, thread, thrift store paintings, anonymous photographs, ceramic shards, scrap metal and vines. She selects and organizes materials, surfaces, colors, and spatial patterns into a new and highly charged personal imagery.

Southworth awakens our sensibilities to the immense collision of values, forms and effects derived from simple things discovered in our most familiar places. Shared among the objects Southworth assembles is a history of human labor and endeavor. Common things that fingers have plied or carressed. Southworth provides a continuim by faithfully working her materials with obsessive and repetitive methods such as stitching, cobbling, and assorted fastening techniques along with repeated tearing, cutting, burning and piercing.