Welder’s Daughter: The Waiting Room is an installation created during the summer months of the pandemic lockdowns for the exhibition DRAWN: Concept and Craft. I uncovered pieces from Welder's Daughter, a ten year-old body of work, and designed this setting around them. Initially, the Welder’s Daughter series combined the rigidity and grit of steel work with feminine delicacy and the ornamentation of an unattainable class.

During the pandemic face shields, a once devalued item, became highly sought after PPE prompting me to revisit this work. The wallpaper pattern was made exclusively with flocked or rusted iron filings collected during my parents’ collaborative steel work made over 700 miles from me. During that intense time of isolation it was comforting to smell the familiar scent of my dad’s steel shop embedded in the filings and felt a brief closeness to that part of my past as I worked. Even going through the King Architectural Metals catalog for pattern design flooded me with memories of childhood boredom in his office.