Artist Bio: 

RACHEL IVY CLARKE is an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University where her award-winning work focuses on the application of art and design approaches to libraries and data science. She holds a BA from California State University Long Beach, an MLIS from San Jose State University, and a PhD from the University of Washington. 

 Artist Statement: 

I am a non-traditional conceptual artist working in textile forms with social and communal roots that embody both individual style and communal creativity. I combine typically feminine folk art traditions like knitting and quilting with principles from my formal education in classification and information science to humanize clinical data and surface perspectives that have traditionally been reduced or erased. While my early work explored information form and genre, my current work interrogates how traditional textile techniques like patchwork, reverse applique, and bargello can be used to express specific datasets, such as gender and race in the US Senate, COVID-19 death rates, and personal health data, resulting in visceral forms that provoke viewers into seeing textile arts and data in new ways. I also harness the community roots of the media by creating interactive patchwork quilts at community events. By selecting fabrics, colors, and shapes to represent data like direction and distance traveled, attendees and I co-construct patchwork pieces on site, resulting in a unique collaborative artwork that juxtaposes the slow, small, community-based aspects of folk arts with our contemporary information society.