ABOUT ME
About: Born in New Orleans Louisiana
Mixed Media and Fiber Artist
Lives in the Northern California Bay Area
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Fiber fabrication from source to final material
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Wire sculpture and weaving
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Large and small scale woven wall hangings and sculpture
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Wet and needle felted paintings
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Paper and plant based weaving
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Hand thrown pottery and sculpture
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Acrylic painting
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Furniture design
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Interior Design
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Art consulting
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Private and group lessons
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Youth art instruction
Dinah Mcfarlane is a California artist that works predominantly in the realm of visual and fiber arts. Utilizing intuitive sensibilities, creates handmade sculptures that serve as a conduit to connect us to the natural world. Work possesses a textural quality that invites the viewer to interpret and explore the intricacies for each piece. With a harmonious blend of elements that mimic the complexities of nature, my artwork hopefully celebrates the incredible designs found in the natural world. My pieces embody the idea of resilience, capturing both the fragile and tenacious aspects of nature through the diverse use of textures and representations of growth. By weaving together the organic, the found and the artistic, the designs invite all to ponder the cycles of growth and decay in the natural world. Through art, I aim to forge an unbreakable bond to the beauty and complicated cycles around us while offering a poignant reflection on the delicacy of our existence.
Weaving is a slow meditative process that allows for time to embed a memory in the material. Whether from a plant or animal, the fiber also has its own behavior and memories from harvesting to packaging ingrained into the strands. Each version of a design ends up only being an inspiration for the final piece because the process is about working with the movement of the material while infusing my own energy into it. Emotions play a part of the final outcome as they become infused with each bend, knot, loop or cascade of thread. The mental and physical processes merge, then dissolve into the piece to produce something unique that cannot be repeated again. It all comes down to time and the luxury of reflecting on past experiences. Things seen and unseen, people loved and lost…the concept of time slips away while creating an image of something that may last for another generation or more.
Central to my pieces is the forming of something recognizable but still abstract. The looping of wire is repeated over hours, then bent into yet another form. A simple strand of paper is layered to create images from shadow and light, strength and fragility. Animal fiber is shaped, twisted, dyed, felted, sculpted into something completely new with only a small recognition of the animal it came from.
