"We are thrilled that the Oregon Fringe Festival has awarded "Meteor" mainstay Mareike Mirsch with a Fellowship for influencing and participating in our performance. 

It is also a recognition of her creative career through the years!

Each year, we award honoraria to artists whose creative work is boundary-breaking, unconventional, excites discussion, and explores different perspectives of a held position, principle, and/or belief.

Marieka Mirsch, aka Cromika, works with whatever materials she has on hand. She began crocheting when she was nine years old. Now, with twenty years of experience and her volunteer role at Mecca in Eugene, she now has access to more fun and frivolous embellishments. She likes the fun of the go-with-the-flow nature of having access to scrap yarns both from Mecca and Goodwill: 'it’s a surprise grab-bag, you never know what you’re going to end up with.' The freedom of expression that comes from the chaotic choices available is part of the magic that makes these crochet creatures, garments and work of art distinctly Cromika.

When Cromika uses up scrap yarn, she says it feels like she’s 'cleaning up yarn barf'. For the Crazy Quilt, each chaotic fragment that makes up the whole was intuitively made. Puddles of yarn barf combined together and embellished with trinkets and goodies that lead the eye around with delight. This sense of humor paired with practicality sums up the artist and her work. She effortlessly listens to and feels the yarn to put together all of her crocheted works. This is her first departure into making abstract work, and Crazy Quilt is a dazzling game of 'I-Spy' in quilt form. In describing how she chose what and how to create this piece she says she is 'just letting the yarn tell me what it wants to be'.

Cromika has a deep devotion to her craft. An excellent crocheter, she is always learning new stitches and skills, following new patterns closely, and diligently working through many books of patterns, often working through an entire book one-by-one, in order, completing each project within. The exciting push-pull that exists here is that she is also able to let go and indulge in the medium in an intuitive way where colors decide for themselves, and inventive details are added to build whimsical characters, like a construction-worker beaver holding a road-cone.

Putting up yarn-based works for the public to see is the definition of yarn-bombing. While Cromika prefers function over fashion, she’s excited to continue to explore these vibrant creative avenues through a yarn-bombing lens."