Every day I feel compelled to create: I am a maker at heart. As a self-taught mixed-media artist, every experience, workshop, experiment and mistake — whether in life or in my studio — becomes a form of education. Over the course of my 30-plus-year career, I have experimented with a plethora of materials and techniques — porcelain, wood, wire, metal, paper, encaustic, oil, cold wax, acrylic, sculpture, printmaking and collage, to name a few. I simply have to make, and materiality is at the core of my work.
Like most, I am who I am in large part because of my parents. I was raised by a dad who, even in the courtroom as a trial lawyer, filled the margins of his legal pads with drawings of whimsical characters that he later developed into a 30-year printmaking and drawing practice after retirement. Outside the courtroom, he studied and performed magic while my mom hardly had time to change out of her leotard and tights after dance class in order to return to her life as our mother. A dance and art history teacher, she usually carried a slide projector in the car (or in whichever arm was free) and somehow managed to remember to put swatches of fabric in her oversized pocketbook in case she happened to find a spare second to pop into a fabric store. (She and I have a lot in common.)
In a neat parallel to my dad’s later art making, the last two-plus decades have seen my mother fashioning vibrant fabrics into treasured quilts. Her typical day when I was growing up was a blizzard of events and commitments, and it was always informed by her signature creativity. She was deeply engaged with our local arts center; it was there I took every art and dance class offered, including puppet-making, painting, clay, drama, and more. My parents were, essentially, performance artists, and my two sisters and I followed their lead. It’s no wonder all three of us became artists — it would be a wonder had we not.
PHOTO BY STACEY EVANS
I inherited a number of things from my dad, including a battle with depression. I got to know the disease as a lingering sort of melancholy through the years. As one of my assistants once said, “Frankie, I get it … you are just feeling the world.” Yes, I guess we artists feel the world.
I have no shame about the fact that I’ve suffered from depression and often share my story, urging people to bring any darkness they have out of the shadows. Part of my father’s legacy is also his desire to change and grow, as well as his grit and determination, which became important factors as I sought help.
I reflect what I live, making or attempting to make what I see and feel, what I experience. As an adult, I began my artistic journey when my children were infants, experimenting with clay and eventually hand-building decorative and abstract sculptures.
While I was living in Hong Kong a few years later (where my family relocated), I began to add discarded elements to my clay works — objects I would find on the hours-long hikes I took every morning. Assemblage quickly became a newfound passion. As my work began to assume multiple layers and dimensions, moving beyond clay alone, I became fascinated with the themes of adornment — how, why, and when we adorn ourselves.
As living and traveling in Asia became a part of my identity, it began to inform my work. Through my explorations, I began to build a collection of beads and textiles sourced from Southeast Asia. A natural next step was to “collage” these diverse, often patterned, materials into wearable necklaces and garments. This work developed into a seven-year business of one-of-a-kind necklaces and jackets, which I presented and sold at juried craft shows around the U.S.
Eventually, as I came closer and closer to entering the fashion world — and recognizing that I didn’t want to be a designer — I came to a crossroads. If I viewed the jewelry and garments as I would a collection of paintings, it was time to pivot and move toward what new creative work awaited me.
As I reentered life in Virginia, the question of who I had been before I left for Asia — and who I was now — bubbled to the surface. Along with earlier questions around adornment came a necessity to highlight social constructs, personal facades and notions of inclusion (and exclusion). What facades had I chosen to leave behind?
My 2013 exhibition Unravel continued to orbit around garments, but this time, abstract sculptural versions of the wearables were featured in the form of larger-than-life paper dresses.
A subsequent exhibition featured a dress fabricated with copper, wood and mirrors. The mirrored dress invited the viewer into considerations of vulnerability, personal armor, outer masks and disguises. The viewer faced the armature and bare substrates of a “garment” void of fabric as well as their own reflection dwelling inside.
Ever since leaving the wearable jackets behind, I have continued to experiment with textiles of all kinds. Most recently, an exhibition space in Charlottesville, Virginia, offered the rare opportunity to think big. And so I did, creating a 15-feet-by-10-feet monochromatic textile titled Pathways to Understanding, the largest-scale work of my career.
To me, each square section of this work represents, in a sense, a language different from the ones surrounding it; creating not a cacophony but, rather, a harmony of many languages fluidly coexisting and culminating in a mutually understood conversation. The conversation is one where each language preserves its own personality, and yet the collective exists in cohesive unity.
I approached this project one square at a time, eventually sewing more than 140 squares together. I found the raw materials for the textile in thrift stores where I bought every white or off-white dress, skirt, coat or tutu I could find, then rushed to my studio to transform them into squares of repeating shapes and patterns.
By twisting, cutting, overlapping, pulling and weaving these fabrics into quirky, bumpy, loopy, textured patterns, each square became individual and unlike the one before. Like the projector my mother slung under her arm, I carted my sewing machine to every out-of-town place I went and left a trail of felt, fabric scraps and threads behind.
Next came the painstaking assembly process, which necessitated the help of a few studio assistants and a lot of square footage — more than my studio had to offer. I cleared the furniture out of my living room; we spread out the 15-feet-by-10-feet canvas and began securely hand-sewing each square to this substrate.
As we neared the middle of the canvas, there were new challenges for me as the principal sewer: It was heavy work to lift the weight of the growing piece (over 50 pounds) and the repetition of the action rubbed the skin off my arms. But where there’s a will there’s a way: I fashioned socks into forearm sleeves for protection and kept sewing.
The textile became the axis for my solo exhibition Interplay (February–March, 2024), which included large encaustic paintings, collages, and smaller porcelain panels, and could be considered a three-dimensional expression of the playful exploration and moments of convergence that are present in my intensely colorful paintings.
In an essay written for this exhibition, artist, author and educator David Hornung stated, “The forms themselves, in their variety, echo the shapes and gestures Slaughter uses in her paintings. But, due to their restrained palette and to the unequivocal character of sculpture form, her work in clay and textile offers a quieter, more contemplative visual experience of a similar shape vocabulary.”
A unifying way to view my work is through the lens of collage and its properties: the constant layering and overlapping of (competing) materials, or the act of finding wholeness in disparate parts. Whether I’m working in paint, clay or fabric, the medium presents a creative challenge to my imagination as I stay open to discovery and the role of chance. Because I want the process to be a part of my work, the viewer will always find an interaction between what came before and what comes after — in other words, with the history of the making.
Ultimately, my work is not about closure or tidy packages; rather, it braves the unrefined chaos where the only language is a visual expression that urges the viewer to stay again and again in the imperfect but beautiful moment. What persists is an eagerness and an openness to see (and feel) where the world and work take me next.
As Hornung put it: “Always present in [Slaughter’s] work is the expectation of freedom and the sense that anything might happen.”
PHOTO BY TASHA TOLLIVER
Every day I feel compelled to create: I am a maker at heart. As a self-taught mixed-media artist, every experience, workshop, experiment and mistake — whether in life or in my studio — becomes a form of education. Over the course of my 30-plus-year career, I have experimented with a plethora of materials and techniques — porcelain, wood, wire, metal, paper, encaustic, oil, cold wax, acrylic, sculpture, printmaking and collage, to name a few. I simply have to make, and materiality is at the core of my work.
Like most, I am who I am in large part because of my parents. I was raised by a dad who, even in the courtroom as a trial lawyer, filled the margins of his legal pads with drawings of whimsical characters that he later developed into a 30-year printmaking and drawing practice after retirement. Outside the courtroom, he studied and performed magic while my mom hardly had time to change out of her leotard and tights after dance class in order to return to her life as our mother. A dance and art history teacher, she usually carried a slide projector in the car (or in whichever arm was free) and somehow managed to remember to put swatches of fabric in her oversized pocketbook in case she happened to find a spare second to pop into a fabric store. (She and I have a lot in common.)
In a neat parallel to my dad’s later art making, the last two-plus decades have seen my mother fashioning vibrant fabrics into treasured quilts. Her typical day when I was growing up was a blizzard of events and commitments, and it was always informed by her signature creativity. She was deeply engaged with our local arts center; it was there I took every art and dance class offered, including puppet-making, painting, clay, drama, and more. My parents were, essentially, performance artists, and my two sisters and I followed their lead. It’s no wonder all three of us became artists — it would be a wonder had we not.
PHOTO BY STACEY EVANS
I inherited a number of things from my dad, including a battle with depression. I got to know the disease as a lingering sort of melancholy through the years. As one of my assistants once said, “Frankie, I get it … you are just feeling the world.” Yes, I guess we artists feel the world.
I have no shame about the fact that I’ve suffered from depression and often share my story, urging people to bring any darkness they have out of the shadows. Part of my father’s legacy is also his desire to change and grow, as well as his grit and determination, which became important factors as I sought help.
I reflect what I live, making or attempting to make what I see and feel, what I experience. As an adult, I began my artistic journey when my children were infants, experimenting with clay and eventually hand-building decorative and abstract sculptures.
While I was living in Hong Kong a few years later (where my family relocated), I began to add discarded elements to my clay works — objects I would find on the hours-long hikes I took every morning. Assemblage quickly became a newfound passion. As my work began to assume multiple layers and dimensions, moving beyond clay alone, I became fascinated with the themes of adornment — how, why, and when we adorn ourselves.
As living and traveling in Asia became a part of my identity, it began to inform my work. Through my explorations, I began to build a collection of beads and textiles sourced from Southeast Asia. A natural next step was to “collage” these diverse, often patterned, materials into wearable necklaces and garments. This work developed into a seven-year business of one-of-a-kind necklaces and jackets, which I presented and sold at juried craft shows around the U.S.
Eventually, as I came closer and closer to entering the fashion world — and recognizing that I didn’t want to be a designer — I came to a crossroads. If I viewed the jewelry and garments as I would a collection of paintings, it was time to pivot and move toward what new creative work awaited me.
As I reentered life in Virginia, the question of who I had been before I left for Asia — and who I was now — bubbled to the surface. Along with earlier questions around adornment came a necessity to highlight social constructs, personal facades and notions of inclusion (and exclusion). What facades had I chosen to leave behind?
My 2013 exhibition Unravel continued to orbit around garments, but this time, abstract sculptural versions of the wearables were featured in the form of larger-than-life paper dresses.
A subsequent exhibition featured a dress fabricated with copper, wood and mirrors. The mirrored dress invited the viewer into considerations of vulnerability, personal armor, outer masks and disguises. The viewer faced the armature and bare substrates of a “garment” void of fabric as well as their own reflection dwelling inside.
Ever since leaving the wearable jackets behind, I have continued to experiment with textiles of all kinds. Most recently, an exhibition space in Charlottesville, Virginia, offered the rare opportunity to think big. And so I did, creating a 15-feet-by-10-feet monochromatic textile titled Pathways to Understanding, the largest-scale work of my career.
To me, each square section of this work represents, in a sense, a language different from the ones surrounding it; creating not a cacophony but, rather, a harmony of many languages fluidly coexisting and culminating in a mutually understood conversation. The conversation is one where each language preserves its own personality, and yet the collective exists in cohesive unity.
I approached this project one square at a time, eventually sewing more than 140 squares together. I found the raw materials for the textile in thrift stores where I bought every white or off-white dress, skirt, coat or tutu I could find, then rushed to my studio to transform them into squares of repeating shapes and patterns.
By twisting, cutting, overlapping, pulling and weaving these fabrics into quirky, bumpy, loopy, textured patterns, each square became individual and unlike the one before. Like the projector my mother slung under her arm, I carted my sewing machine to every out-of-town place I went and left a trail of felt, fabric scraps and threads behind.
Next came the painstaking assembly process, which necessitated the help of a few studio assistants and a lot of square footage — more than my studio had to offer. I cleared the furniture out of my living room; we spread out the 15-feet-by-10-feet canvas and began securely hand-sewing each square to this substrate.
As we neared the middle of the canvas, there were new challenges for me as the principal sewer: It was heavy work to lift the weight of the growing piece (over 50 pounds) and the repetition of the action rubbed the skin off my arms. But where there’s a will there’s a way: I fashioned socks into forearm sleeves for protection and kept sewing.
The textile became the axis for my solo exhibition Interplay (February–March, 2024), which included large encaustic paintings, collages, and smaller porcelain panels, and could be considered a three-dimensional expression of the playful exploration and moments of convergence that are present in my intensely colorful paintings.
In an essay written for this exhibition, artist, author and educator David Hornung stated, “The forms themselves, in their variety, echo the shapes and gestures Slaughter uses in her paintings. But, due to their restrained palette and to the unequivocal character of sculpture form, her work in clay and textile offers a quieter, more contemplative visual experience of a similar shape vocabulary.”
A unifying way to view my work is through the lens of collage and its properties: the constant layering and overlapping of (competing) materials, or the act of finding wholeness in disparate parts. Whether I’m working in paint, clay or fabric, the medium presents a creative challenge to my imagination as I stay open to discovery and the role of chance. Because I want the process to be a part of my work, the viewer will always find an interaction between what came before and what comes after — in other words, with the history of the making.
Ultimately, my work is not about closure or tidy packages; rather, it braves the unrefined chaos where the only language is a visual expression that urges the viewer to stay again and again in the imperfect but beautiful moment. What persists is an eagerness and an openness to see (and feel) where the world and work take me next.
As Hornung put it: “Always present in [Slaughter’s] work is the expectation of freedom and the sense that anything might happen.”
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PHOTO BY TASHA TOLLIVER
Every day I feel compelled to create: I am a maker at heart. As a self-taught mixed-media artist, every experience, workshop, experiment and mistake — whether in life or in my studio — becomes a form of education. Over the course of my 30-plus-year career, I have experimented with a plethora of materials and techniques — porcelain, wood, wire, metal, paper, encaustic, oil, cold wax, acrylic, sculpture, printmaking and collage, to name a few. I simply have to make, and materiality is at the core of my work.
Like most, I am who I am in large part because of my parents. I was raised by a dad who, even in the courtroom as a trial lawyer, filled the margins of his legal pads with drawings of whimsical characters that he later developed into a 30-year printmaking and drawing practice after retirement. Outside the courtroom, he studied and performed magic while my mom hardly had time to change out of her leotard and tights after dance class in order to return to her life as our mother. A dance and art history teacher, she usually carried a slide projector in the car (or in whichever arm was free) and somehow managed to remember to put swatches of fabric in her oversized pocketbook in case she happened to find a spare second to pop into a fabric store. (She and I have a lot in common.)
In a neat parallel to my dad’s later art making, the last two-plus decades have seen my mother fashioning vibrant fabrics into treasured quilts. Her typical day when I was growing up was a blizzard of events and commitments, and it was always informed by her signature creativity. She was deeply engaged with our local arts center; it was there I took every art and dance class offered, including puppet-making, painting, clay, drama, and more. My parents were, essentially, performance artists, and my two sisters and I followed their lead. It’s no wonder all three of us became artists — it would be a wonder had we not.
PHOTO BY STACEY EVANS
I inherited a number of things from my dad, including a battle with depression. I got to know the disease as a lingering sort of melancholy through the years. As one of my assistants once said, “Frankie, I get it … you are just feeling the world.” Yes, I guess we artists feel the world.
I have no shame about the fact that I’ve suffered from depression and often share my story, urging people to bring any darkness they have out of the shadows. Part of my father’s legacy is also his desire to change and grow, as well as his grit and determination, which became important factors as I sought help.
I reflect what I live, making or attempting to make what I see and feel, what I experience. As an adult, I began my artistic journey when my children were infants, experimenting with clay and eventually hand-building decorative and abstract sculptures.
While I was living in Hong Kong a few years later (where my family relocated), I began to add discarded elements to my clay works — objects I would find on the hours-long hikes I took every morning. Assemblage quickly became a newfound passion. As my work began to assume multiple layers and dimensions, moving beyond clay alone, I became fascinated with the themes of adornment — how, why, and when we adorn ourselves.
As living and traveling in Asia became a part of my identity, it began to inform my work. Through my explorations, I began to build a collection of beads and textiles sourced from Southeast Asia. A natural next step was to “collage” these diverse, often patterned, materials into wearable necklaces and garments. This work developed into a seven-year business of one-of-a-kind necklaces and jackets, which I presented and sold at juried craft shows around the U.S.
Eventually, as I came closer and closer to entering the fashion world — and recognizing that I didn’t want to be a designer — I came to a crossroads. If I viewed the jewelry and garments as I would a collection of paintings, it was time to pivot and move toward what new creative work awaited me.
As I reentered life in Virginia, the question of who I had been before I left for Asia — and who I was now — bubbled to the surface. Along with earlier questions around adornment came a necessity to highlight social constructs, personal facades and notions of inclusion (and exclusion). What facades had I chosen to leave behind?
My 2013 exhibition Unravel continued to orbit around garments, but this time, abstract sculptural versions of the wearables were featured in the form of larger-than-life paper dresses.
A subsequent exhibition featured a dress fabricated with copper, wood and mirrors. The mirrored dress invited the viewer into considerations of vulnerability, personal armor, outer masks and disguises. The viewer faced the armature and bare substrates of a “garment” void of fabric as well as their own reflection dwelling inside.
Ever since leaving the wearable jackets behind, I have continued to experiment with textiles of all kinds. Most recently, an exhibition space in Charlottesville, Virginia, offered the rare opportunity to think big. And so I did, creating a 15-feet-by-10-feet monochromatic textile titled Pathways to Understanding, the largest-scale work of my career.
To me, each square section of this work represents, in a sense, a language different from the ones surrounding it; creating not a cacophony but, rather, a harmony of many languages fluidly coexisting and culminating in a mutually understood conversation. The conversation is one where each language preserves its own personality, and yet the collective exists in cohesive unity.
I approached this project one square at a time, eventually sewing more than 140 squares together. I found the raw materials for the textile in thrift stores where I bought every white or off-white dress, skirt, coat or tutu I could find, then rushed to my studio to transform them into squares of repeating shapes and patterns.
By twisting, cutting, overlapping, pulling and weaving these fabrics into quirky, bumpy, loopy, textured patterns, each square became individual and unlike the one before. Like the projector my mother slung under her arm, I carted my sewing machine to every out-of-town place I went and left a trail of felt, fabric scraps and threads behind.
Next came the painstaking assembly process, which necessitated the help of a few studio assistants and a lot of square footage — more than my studio had to offer. I cleared the furniture out of my living room; we spread out the 15-feet-by-10-feet canvas and began securely hand-sewing each square to this substrate.
As we neared the middle of the canvas, there were new challenges for me as the principal sewer: It was heavy work to lift the weight of the growing piece (over 50 pounds) and the repetition of the action rubbed the skin off my arms. But where there’s a will there’s a way: I fashioned socks into forearm sleeves for protection and kept sewing.
The textile became the axis for my solo exhibition Interplay (February–March, 2024), which included large encaustic paintings, collages, and smaller porcelain panels, and could be considered a three-dimensional expression of the playful exploration and moments of convergence that are present in my intensely colorful paintings.
In an essay written for this exhibition, artist, author and educator David Hornung stated, “The forms themselves, in their variety, echo the shapes and gestures Slaughter uses in her paintings. But, due to their restrained palette and to the unequivocal character of sculpture form, her work in clay and textile offers a quieter, more contemplative visual experience of a similar shape vocabulary.”
A unifying way to view my work is through the lens of collage and its properties: the constant layering and overlapping of (competing) materials, or the act of finding wholeness in disparate parts. Whether I’m working in paint, clay or fabric, the medium presents a creative challenge to my imagination as I stay open to discovery and the role of chance. Because I want the process to be a part of my work, the viewer will always find an interaction between what came before and what comes after — in other words, with the history of the making.
Ultimately, my work is not about closure or tidy packages; rather, it braves the unrefined chaos where the only language is a visual expression that urges the viewer to stay again and again in the imperfect but beautiful moment. What persists is an eagerness and an openness to see (and feel) where the world and work take me next.
As Hornung put it: “Always present in [Slaughter’s] work is the expectation of freedom and the sense that anything might happen.”
The Women Create Foundation is a catalyst for small but significant strides to empower women creators through grants that help bring projects to life and foster innovation.
