Santa Fe Reporter: SFR Digital-ish Picks
7/29/2020
Mikayla Patton takes a cue from the great outdoors
"I was planning on having quite a few pieces done, but then my residency [at the School for Advanced Research] started and I ended up putting a lot of things on the back burner," Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota) tells SFR, as if the works in her upcoming Hecho a Mano show aren't enough on their own—or aren't incredible.
When the COVID-19 lockdown kicked into high gear, Patton found herself with limited resources and sequestered in her small Santa Fe apartment. Perhaps better known as a printmaker and jewelry designer, Patton pivoted to beadwork, both as a style she'd always wanted to try, and as a painstaking process to help keep her mind off the fate of the world. That, along with paper she makes herself, became a full-time project, and small pieces based on the environment were born.
"It was getting warm outside, and all I really wanted to do was be outside, but it felt like we were forced inside," she says. "It felt weird, I needed nature in my life, so I focused my designs off of landscapes and sky."
