Lee Davignon (She/They) is a textile and installation artist living and working in the Cascade foothills of Washington. Born and raised in Rhode Island, they earned their BFA in Fibers from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013. Davignon’s sculpture and installation form out of a material-led investigation that exists at the intersection of waste stream materials an extensive library of craft skills. Her work has been shown at the Fuller Craft Museum, SAM ReMix, Spring Break NYC, Common AREA Gallery, Shunpike Storefronts,The Factory, and the Klondike National Historical Park.

I am a mixed media artist working in textiles, sculpture, and installation. Through a combination of traditional textile techniques, sculptural experiments, and material play, my work explores themes of waste, value, and craft. As a weaver, I am interested in the connection between the rise of disposability culture and the disappearance of craftsmanship from commercial production. Materially, I work in the waste stream, mining my own daily interactions with ‘disposable’ objects for supplies. Depending on where I am working, these sources change, and have ranged from used bike tires from my local bike shop to collecting waste material from my work on construction sites and in the textile industry. In this way my work acts as a material mapping, tracing my connections with the waste stream and creating an abstracted sense of place for viewers who may recognize the print on a plastic newspaper bag or the texture of a sweatshirt. Working in the waste stream allows me to be playful with my work, asking questions and gauging responses: can it be stretched, layered, cut, punctured, soaked, knotted, or stiffened? These freeform interactions lead to moments of discovery that drive my inquiry onward. My aim with this work is to create art that provokes curiosity and encourages discourse on our role as consumers within systems of commodification and waste.