The Great Basin Murders
Funded in part with grants from the Alexa Rose Foundation, the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the Boise State University College of Arts and Sciences.
The Great Basin Murders is a collaborative series commemorating victims of unsolved homicides in the Mountain West with handwoven burial shrouds and site-specific photography. I am drawn to this phenomenon of women’s bodies found at remote sites because of how harsh, vast, and desolate these locations are. Imagining a body left out in the open landscape for months or years compels me to handweave shrouds to metaphorically protect the victims.
I develop structural weaving patterns from data about each victim including height, weight and age estimates, the date when they were was found, and the GPS coordinates of where they were found. I incorporate details through traditional textile processes rendering tattoos with embroidery, appliquéing clothing remnants, and embellishing with found jewelry. While the shrouds commemorating unidentified victims are an attempt to broach the anonymity through devotional craft, the resulting woven panels remain visually austere illustrating the absence of information that characterizes many cold cases. I weave shrouds to commemorate victims who were identified, although their cases are unsolved by creating weaving patterns based on their dates of birth and death and using colors and embellishment specific to details about the women’s lives. By weaving these shrouds, I seek to give each victim a gesture of respect not previously afforded to them.
I collaborate with Carrie Quinney who documents the shrouds at the site where each victim was found, stylistically bridging crime scene documentation and landscape photography. These images position the shrouds as bodies, contextualizing the series in art historical movements considering violence against women, all against the backdrop of the foreboding and desolate Western landscape.