I am interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, ground us in place and time, yet tether us to our ancestral past and future—the lines that bring us home. In the Delicate Meshes is a project of wayfinding that grapples with processing contemporary questions of living, observing and mulling them, while delving into the practices of female artists of the past whose work was based on craft or spiritualism. It is a conversation across time and a way of communing with the visual insights of women who came before. It is a way to make an impossible photograph, to capture what is not consolidated in a given moment, but exists over time, a process of drawing in while reaching for what is beyond. Thread and sewing are the foundation of my creative voice, having first picked up a needle to make doll clothes in childhood. Working this way has been a meditation and solace through which I have sought refuge and found understanding and insight, close observation, and voice.  I have long been inspired by quilts, embroidery and garments of the past and how they carry the labor of unrecognized hands, how they tell a story full of hours and days, but also how fiber and craft have been historically lesser recognized as art, as women’s work.  I am particularly interested in the work of Lenore Tawney, Sophie Tauber Arp, Francoise Grossen and the Gees Bend Quilters. I am also inspired by women whose artwork was grounded in a spiritual practice of divining and communing with energies beyond themselves, like Emma Kunz and Hilma Af Klint.  Each piece in this series is a quilted conversation, a way of taking the disparate questions and feeling of a given moment and mingling them with inspiration from the outside world and the work of those who came before. The synthesis creates a new form, an imagined cosmic map or quilt on paper that coheres these disparate pieces into a grounding, geometrical structure.

An Infinite Expansion

It is the sky just before sunrise
On this winters morning where
Dusky rose golds meet
Shifting blues of heaven and sea

This is where we begin
Again
To take what is fractured
and refracted
And hold the mirror anew
To see how light bounces off
Into a spectrum
We might not yet perceive

The astral lies between and before us and
From these earthen hues we grasp at colored fire
Not to unweave the rainbow
Marking space between each spectral color
But finding the tapestry "where all colors are one thing seen in different states of motion"
Where the lines of our bodies
Seen as certain separation
Are the least of all things
This trick of light might reveal we are merely particles of dust floating one moment
And earthbound matter weighted by wild grief the next

This is the flux of sussing
From beauty to base and back again
An infinite space of ask
Where we might breathe in the peace of unknown things

It is the sky just before sunrise.

Growing up wandering the streets of New York City I learned my way around based on the grid of city blocks, using the numerical sequence and nearly consistent form of each block as a guide. 20 blocks running north-south equalled a mile, each east-west block was approximately equivalent to 3 north-south blocks. In order to know a place I’ve always felt I had to walk it, whether in the wilderness or an urban landscape. As I walk, I absorb what is around me hoping to be able to find my way, to relate, to home. If I visit a place and am unable to walk through it, I feel as if I haven’t been there, as if it remains unknown. To move is to know, to feel a part of something.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to participate in an artist residency in Berlin. I spent days walking the streets, trying to find my way into the history of the city, while also trying to find my way to where I was staying, again to home. There was a moment almost a week into my stay when I began to be able to orient without the assistance of a map, to find myself miles away from my bed and able to walk to it as if lured. The city’s map had begun to become my internal compass. Historically many animals are known to be able to find their way home, to be pulled by magnetic force or gauge their place based on polarized light, echolocation and infrasound. You can blindfold a bird, cover its nostrils, cover its ears and more often than not, it will still manage to find its way home. This ability to navigate fascinates me, this ability to make sense of space and time, to understand its complexities infinitely intrigues me. During the aforementioned residency, I became transfixed by increasingly abstract work. It became a way to see or understand on a different plane, to work through without the weight of the literal and yet to embody all of the thoughts, feelings, insight and emotion of living without the obvious reveal. It became a language that captured my attention, a new form of exchange. When I returned home I found my work shot through with a new form of urgency and figuring. Months later I found myself at the Guggenheims Hilma Af Klint show, deeply compelled by the transformatively spiritual plane of her work, the boldness of her expression through abstraction.

Similarly, the art work of Lenore Tawney compels me. Two years ago I encountered one of her line drawings done in 1964 shortly after her first encounter with the Jacquard Loom, an enchanted machine known for allowing the creation of increasingly complex patterns. She created these drawings on grided paper, in which the complexity of the drawing slowly revealed itself through the act of progress to completion. Almost in an act of meditation she layered one line upon the next, not knowing how exactly the completed form would appear.

I too am drawn to this meditative act of webbed complexity. To laying down a foundation and filling in the blanks in hopes of making sense of things, drawing a conclusion, finding a way. As all of our lives shifted radically in March of 2020 I moved from making photographs as my primary practice to breaking them down. I began cutting up photographs and using the cut fragments as the foundational forms to base my drawings on, to find a new way. I repeated these forms over and over drawing them in pencil, watercolors, thread and pinpricks.

Pricking paper with pins felt like a way to create something from nothing, to erect form from space. A pinhole camera captures whole worlds through a prick in the surface and I thought maybe all of these pricks were images not being made, experiences not being had, something captured and connected at a standstill.

But so to these drawings are webs of connection, swarms, a manifestation of collective and collected energies. A way to find the kindred. Like mycellium, the underground hyphal network of interconnected strands that comprise a sort of ecological connective tissue, they are homing maps. Mycelial homing occurs when fungal hyphae’s threadlike tendrils branch and fuse reaching out toward a new part of itself and glomming on in an act of growth and expansion. Through connection the mycelium increases in size to form complex networks, ever attracting one thread to the next. Mycelial networks are in constant communication with themselves, pulsing chemical signals surge across the network allowing the organism to engage in complex trading relationships; to knead away at stores of nutrients in the soil, to convey messages about injury and conditions, and to hunt or fend off attackers. This notion of decentralized and moving intelligence has drawn me in. The possibility that intelligence comes, not from a centralized brain, but that it is stored throughout a structure as a complex network of neurons flexibly remodeling itself, that in the act of connecting and growing, of linking up, the capacity of the network expands, adjusts, almost understands. That’s kind of amazing.


Mycelium is the largest known organism on planet earth, the biggest weighs hundreds of tons, spreads across ten square kilometers and is between two and eight thousand years old. It is comprised of individual strands/parts working in concert to achieve desired outcomes, this notion of inherent cooperation is both foreign and familiar. I am drawn to think how we as humans have the capacity to be in such union, communion, to communicate and act in similar ways to mycelium, to home, to work together on behalf of a greater good, to find a new way, sometimes without words or what we think of as typical intelligent communication. We too are an intertwined organism passing signals, bacteria, viruses and sloughed off cells between one another, reliant on the pulse of others actions to propel the human experiment forward, and yet we are interrupted by the forces of our perceived individuality, subtracting ourselves from the responsibility of a larger equation. As we pulse through the world, alone we are perhaps just a jumble of threads, but in concert with others those threads extend to weave an ever evolving and dissolving pattern, to find and make a certain form of home. To make sense.

This work is my effort to make sense. To take the slow road of absorbing all that surrounds, to let it sink in, connect and reach back to link to the larger possibility of our webbed intersecting communion.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

In grappling with what it means to live in the here and now as humanity changes faster than ever, producing and consuming at greater rates by the second, I am struck by the feeling that we are racing toward our own demise.  Since 1970 60% of each wild species on the planet has disappeared and although this gives us humans pause, collectively we are more interested in our own unique endeavors than the effort required to slow our extinction— believing possibly that technology will save us, that we might modify or cyborg ourselves into a future existence that could persist despite an inhospitable planet.  As we “evolve” through time we create and produce both a great impact on the planet and a tremendous amount of refuse.  We live amongst the detritus of our over consumption.  Things that were once innovative end up in mountainous dumps, floating in the sea, preserved in museums, obsolete momentos in our homes.  With a glance we look upon the past, but cast it off just as we move forward in time.  I am interested in the path we have taken, how we got to where we are today through our fanciful machines, objects of wonder, botany of destruction.  I am interested in the remnants, the symbols of our culture, repurposing and resurrecting them, telling the story of the beauty and destruction of what was, the great possibility of the human experiment, what we have sought to create and the tragedy of our failing as we shred limb from limb the ecosystems and biodiversity of this great planet, leaving behind fewer species, a lonelier existence on this pale blue dot.

Possibility In Multitudes

I dreamt there was a thread

It ran through each of us

Tied one to the next to the next

Crossed over and back

Forming a web

That strung us up

Together

Hovering just above the ground

We were tethered

To the here and now

Yet undone

Lifted into another time

This sense

Of being

A piece of connective tissue

In which dismantled by breath and blood

We are both made and destroyed by the lightness of being

So much possibility in our hands

And the things that firmly root us

Now we gather stories and knot threads

Seek to define something 

Maybe non-human in its consciousness

Which makes our being possible

Starlings, Cedar and Sycamore

Cerulean tides 

Change tumbling through and

The moon that also rises

In puddles stand our reflections

Then another

Linking us    past to present

The wisp of futures

Thriving and deceased

And what spills forth is the order of things

It is the matter of timing

That unfolds our answers

And we dive and dive again

Into the eye of the storm

To stoke living from our anguish

The word, punctum, as used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida means a sting, cut, little hole - a casting of the dice, something that penetrates the skin. It is the accident that pricks, but also bruises, is poignant. This term is used as regards photographs, but it seems that it is a feeling achieved by a great variety of life experiences. We live in a world where everyday, if we allow the weight of the world in, there is the possibility of puncture. There is so much anguish to absorb, but also so much beauty. How do we live in such a way that we acknowledge the pain and suffering in the world, work to make the world a better place and find and create a space for a loving world to exist? By opening ourselves emotionally, by making ourselves vulnerable, we allow for the possibility of connection and transformation where individual growth begins a chain reaction that can be passed from one person to the next. By allowing our hearts to be squeezed, broken open, to live for a moment inside this space of amplified being, on the raw edge of life, we allow the beauty and pain of the world in, grasp at the possibility of our greater unity. Through the experiences that puncture us we find identification with others, a certain energy harnessed, captured and transferred. This project began while wandering the streets of Berlin, absorbing the history of the city and thinking about the lives that could have been had Hitler not gained power, how all that was taken away, denied, destroyed, in some way still remains. And everyday this worldly loss and destruction continues. The ether of lives cut short threads through geography, informing the lives of those who are here now, imbuing us with a responsibility to bring unlived memories to life. We are each punctured by the past and the present and perhaps it is our greatest gift that we can feel in the here and now for that is what changes us and will change the world.

The Women’s March of January 2017 marked a new wave of resistance bringing millions of people together with a sense of common cause. This mobilization shepherded ignored voices to the fore; provoked by the trauma of a man being elected who flaunted his ability to objectify and molest women. From the greek myth of Cassandra and Apollo to Anita Hill women have not been believed when they speak out against their transgressors. The #MeToo movement of today feels like one of the ways our culture is shifting to acknowledge the experiences of many women. Each woman has a distinct personal and ancestral experience of sexual assault from the brutality of slavery, the rape and massacre of Native women, the violence and aggression that comes with colonization to stories of isolated individual incidents of rape, assault and molestation. By banding together and supporting the diverse voices of women who have been violated and abused, the abuse becomes a visible part of our culture, one we must confront. It is my hope that together we are stronger. That we as 21st century individuals are galvanized by both singular and collective histories of violence against women; that we desire to know deeply the experiences of others, to hold them up to the light in order to speak truth to a power that for centuries has gone unchallenged. Today we stand for change, for our foremothers, the struggles they endured and the work they did to lay the cornerstones of who we are today, to the bright future we imagine for our daughter’s and our daughter’s daughters.

#MeToo is a fine art photography series depicting women young and old giving voice to stories of sexual assault and abuse past and present. It includes twenty women from a diversity of backgrounds all clad in victorian style mourning dresses, a dress worn by European women during the period to connote the loss of a loved one. In this instance it is not the loss of a physical being, but the negation of the voice of women throughout history across the globe whom have been subjected to sexual violence that is referenced by the European style dress, the dress of one of the greatest colonizers in history. The seed of inspiration for this series was planted on the night of the Golden Globes when Hollywood women wore black as a collective voice of protest against the culture of sexual harassment. The #MeToo placard is a sort of reverse scarlet letter, in the case of Hester Pryne, she was made to wear the letter A and stand before a crowd, shamed for the act of adultery, here the collective impact of so many women who have a #MeToo experience is meant to bring awareness, it is a shameful history of unrepentant perpetration that we should no longer be willing to quietly endure. By depicting women of today in a dress code of the past it is my intention to demonstrate the sense of time that women have been subject to sexual abuse in hopes that we can create a cultural shift so that the experience is not perpetuated in future generations

(I recognize that this project is only moderately inclusive and that sexual assault and harassment exists for people of all genders, ages, races, classes and sexual orientations. This projects is just beginning to scratch the surface of an issue and experience that prevades the world over.)

Since the founding of the United States voices of resistance have given rise to concerns and movements to improve the quality of life for a greater intersection of The People.  This series looks to the past to understand the struggles and gallant efforts and endurance of those who came before, to find inspiration in the work they did to lay the cornerstones of who we are today; to build a bridge of conversation between then and now in order to connect more deeply with those who were ignored and devalued in the past in order to imagine a more inclusive, brighter future for generations to come.  These images revisit the lives of numerous historical figures both real and in some cases partially imagined including Harriet Tubman, Betsy Ross, Frances Willard, Ida B Wells, Frances Harper, Pandita Ramabai and Catherine Waugh McCulloch focusing on the early organizing effort of women for social change, and examining the causes and struggles for justice that have transcended time from the fight for abortion rights, voting rights, immigration rights, the right to bare arms and its fall out, to the #MeToo movement, to the thread of history that runs through the abolition of slavery to the anti-lynching movement to the civil rights movement to the Black Lives Matter campaign.  Inspired by the January 2017 and 2018 Women's Marches and the current Year of the Woman as we move toward November 2018 elections, it has felt imperative to look to the past for reminders of hope, to see a timeline of change that respects the humanity of the many over the few.  It is from the triumphs of history that we can imagine a more hopeful union.

Months ago I took these handkerchiefs

Squares folded and tucked away by my grandmother and her mother and opened them to the waft of years.

For a moment I was sitting at my grandmother’s dressing table, inhaling deeply the perfume she kept in a small golden basket that looked like easter and smelled like musk. I was her and then her mother and the year was 1918 and death felt imminent.

I searched and felt for the pieces of fabric that might protect

Used to cover nose and mouth on account of a cough or sneeze.

I felt responsible to myself

But really to everyone

The world around

A world away

This place where

Our breath both gives and takes life.

And it is this sense of the imminence of death that pushes up the need to make good on life.

To tie it up in bundles for those who might come after.

And so I stitched. I took a pile of squares and hitched them together first as a photograph and then pulling time through threads, into a vocabulary of repair. Can you repair the present by tying it to the past, by looking back to see what was done (sometimes wrong sometimes right) and how, by adding the two together to find new ways, holding on to the squares of fabric that were once useful so that we might make them into something new? The Gees Bend quilters have done this masterfully and marvelously, taking what was old and functional, breaking it down to be reframed, rearranged into a recovery of story and time; speaking of those who did the work of living so we might too. Right now this is what feels essential, that it is our responsibility to do the work of living, to salvage from the detritus left in the wake of a certain destruction to do the work of righting ships lest they sail off a metaphorical cliff toward drowning. I feel the need to hold fiercely and gently in the same breathe, to travel in shoes not my own, to dive deep into stories beyond the known, to recover.

***

How do we salvage the texture of our being?

Feel for the frayed edges of fabric now unraveling

How do we selvedge our being?

Hem ourselves in to prevent a fragile periphery from disappearing

We are stitched from beginning to end

Cells sutured one to the next

And if a thread might be snagged tightened

Loosening our grip

The subtlety of our contours could well spill forth

Colliding

Saw toothed and full with crags

Our skin, blood, bone and marrow

Are the raw pieces sometimes exposed to the sun

Sometimes hidden away in dark places

Warm with a haunting safety

I think about what it means to loose one’s edge

Does it mean that we are no longer individual bunkers

But bombed out shells of ourselves

Or have we only shifted untethered roots

Opening seams

to the outside

We might now be hovering

On the verge

Halfway between

Hiding behind walls

Erected

And tearing it all down

Perhaps

Though

An in-between place exists

Where we are unearthed

Brought up to the light and

Amidst dust motes

The filaments of our mottled flesh

Unwoven

Begin to rub up against one another

Enmesh

Toward the strength of new fabric

Woven of wizened fibers

To Begin…

Notes on individual pieces:

#2-10, 12x18 inch prints of stacked handkerchiefs with thread

#11-13, 22x30 inch mixed media watercolor, pencil, pinpricks and thread

#14-16, 20x30 inch photographic print with thread

“An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them.” Proust

There are places made of time where the frayed edges of past & present lap over themselves. If we collect and codify fragments of the gone by, might it still live, coming together, where and when we inhale slowly. In any given epoch we don't quite know our geologic impact, the residual imprint on deep time until that time, sealed up, has come to pass. What lapses as the moon waxes, sliver to crescent to half, full then wanes. When we look back at what's faded from memory, the rock, a certain sediment, we might glimpse the residue of crust and stone, a marker of our being. A moment taken to observe before time turns onward.

I am captivated by the passage of time and the nature of opposing forces. This project began as a consideration of the impact of our actions, I wondered if and how opposing viewpoints could find a middle ground, a way of hearing one another and relating. In looking at the landscape of our nation and world we increasingly insulate and isolate ourselves from those who do not share our views or version of reality and this feels dangerous for the future, a future in which we will need to increasingly come together to solve dire problems with otherwise calamitous outcomes.

I began this project using the work of Anna Atkins and Emma Kunz as source material from distinct vantage points. Anna Atkins was a botanist and early photographer who used the cyanotype photographic process to capture her algae field samples. The results are the meticulous work of a scientist whose work possesses an ethereal beauty. Atkins is heralded as the creator of the first photographic book as she gathered and stitched her prints together and sent them through the mail to colleagues, collectors and friends who bound them and placed them in personal and institutional libraries. Emma Kunz was an intuitive medium who divined drawings in a 24-hour trance like state of focus where she drew geometric images that seem to possess a cosmology of meaning. I use these two women as entry points because they were women little recognized in their time for their talent and contributions, but also because Atkins came from the point of view of science whereas Kunz took a spiritual approach. As has been seen the rational scientific mind often comes into conflict with spirituality and the spiritual or religious mind and its practices. I find great beauty and meaning in the work of both of these women and felt like this project was a chance to further explore their work through a sort of imaginary dinner table conversation with them. As I worked through these pieces I asked what would Anna do in this case and what would Emma do in that case?

Through this project I am coming to understand that opposites might either repel or attract one another and that if we are open to the process of listening and learning we might be changed. Our opposer might reel us in or we them as we merge toward a new becoming. Other times there might be rifts, walls erected, a limb severed, communication cut off, but in this rupture there is the possibility of a learning curve, perhaps a reaching, a desire to convince or compel toward new understanding, a holding on across the distance.

My first pieces in this series use cyanotype photographic prints, archival papers, abstract painting and thread to lay the structure of a vocabulary. Over the course of making these pieces I found myself wanting to cut up the photographic image, to break it down, abstract its form. I thought for sure it would be the opposite, that I would want to build up the abstract form making it into a greater narrative image, something that was relatable and might tell a story, but instead I began to find a greater possibility of meaning in the universality of abstract forms and how they relate to each other. As the cyanotype images broke down and the narrative image seemed to disappear, I began poking holes in paper forming a new way to let the light pass through, to chronicle what came to pass. As I followed the formation of these pinprick and thread drawings, repeating the forms from prior pieces perhaps in search of their former selves or a new resolution, I began to think of them as possible pinhole cameras unto themselves or possible contact surfaces that could be printed, new ways of documenting a moment or a memory. I have found that ultimately opposing forces dissolve into each other even in time as they disperse or disappear. And perhaps this is what matter is fated to do moving from stardust, to rock, to body, breath and out again into the wider universe becoming itself again.

Transparency: The quality of allowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen; having thoughts, feelings and motives that are easily perceived.

This projects aims to explore the balance between privacy and exposure, what it means to be seen and to control what is seen. In a time when privacy, for many purposes, has disappeared we seem to relish and celebrate being exposed, but perhaps our vulnerability, our messiness, this is not so readily seen or shared. Are we transparent? If not, why not? If so, how come?

These images are mined from a cache of my own photos from the past few years. I have taken blue window transparency, the kind used to create the veneer of privacy without disrupting sight and layered it upon prints and then rephotographed them. These layers feel like a building up, a gathering of the residue, of what remains from moving through the world, the dust gathered, the dirt caked on. In some way I want to building up all that is unseen, make it obvious and not at all, marry the many incongruous pieces and particles into some semblance of cohesion. In photography when shooting with artificial lights there is a blue gel which allows you to correct the balance and tone of the artificial light, the blue here perhaps then corrects for what is not seen and lays claim to what else might be being said in any one of these images.

Or perhaps it is all a dream where the sea comes up and drowns us and these images are some kind of memory. A memory like this:

We were standing in the salty brine, at water's edge, in the lapping and I saw a wave mounting its approach. It crested higher than I'd ever seen and in that moment the sea came up and drowned us. We had been immovable until we were swept and taken under, pulled by tow into the mer world. And although I could not breathe I saw that nor could you. For a time we had gills. We were of the sea and our drowning became our breath, propelled by a downward pressure we became stones falling toward the ocean floor. This was the undoing that was done; the dissolution of entities that might once have been separate, but perhaps then became parts of a whole. And when the storm subsided we resurfaced, returned to human form, bobbing, gasping, in an exhausted haze. A measured disorientation, petits canards wading in the grey. We splayed our bodies then, now buoyant, upon that salty surface and left ourselves to float, driftless upon this sea.

I remember the day, at age six, when my great-grandmother’s childhood home was torn down.  It was an opulent place with ballrooms and gilded halls long abandoned for a smaller more practical house on the same property.  Pre-demolition my father lead my older sister and I through the dusty halls and I gapped at the buckling floors and broken windows, imagining what it might have been like to inhabit the space between those walls.  There was another house down the road where my father grew up, where I grew up spending summers, weekends and holidays and where until recently my children spent all of their Christmases.  Two years ago my grandfather passed away and in his passing, this family home, this gathering place, this place of memory ceased to exist.  This loss made me frantic.  I had a desperation to document the place so that I might never forget it, so that my memory might be prompted by the images of a certain room or bench or tree.  Now that this home, this place where I belonged, is gone I have a compelling need to document spaces slated for demolition or drastic renovation, spaces where the possible lives that passed between the walls are palpable or inspire a certain sense of possibility.  In Ghosts Immemorial I aim to bring a whisp of life to spaces forgotten, abandoned, left for dead, spaces we can no longer afford to live in or maintain, spaces deemed no longer necessary for contemporary life, spaces in need of new life.  

A couple of years ago I had a dream in which the first image in this series came to me. Tracking down the phones to express the anxiety of loosing touch became an obsession. In the dream my two young daughters had grown up and left home, moving on to lives of their own in which they were no longer readily available for a conversation or a snuggle. I am somebody who is notoriously bad at staying in touch, a poor communicator to boot. Ever since high school whenever I’d leave home and promise to call my parents to let them know I had arrived safely at my destination, I have succeeded in failing nine times out of ten. This shortcoming is not for lack of love or care, but more a sense of overwhelm and poor time management skills. And so, as a mother of young ones I live with the deep anxiety that when my girls are grown and have flown the coop, they too will forget to call and my heart will ache in the space of silence. I know in my heart of hearts the need for individuation, but I’m holding out hope that we’ll stay in touch. There is a part of me that feels weirdly obsessive and needy in this love or perhaps just fiercely maternal. Sometimes though this loves verges on madness. This is a message to my daughters, Remember that I love you…madly (redact that, as surely I don’t want to scare them away.) Yes, remember that I love you.

As a child some weekends we’d visit my grandparents in a farmhouse of decaying grandeur in New Jersey, other weekends we’d stay home and traipse through the halls of New York City museums.  I always imagined how these places could be different, how they were a partial portal to another time, an imagined life.  In the attic of my grandparents home, there were dust covered steamer trunks filled with fraying ballgowns while the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered a glimpse into the interiors of colonial homes.  I dreamt of wearing those ballgowns and living in another era that I could shapeshift to be different than it actually was.

As the mother of two girls with fanciful imaginations growing up in an era when childhood fantasy is interrupted or negated by technology, I have sought to preserve and create for my daughters a little bit of the magic that I longed in my own childhood. At the same time, I’ve tried to impart an honest sense of the world we live in today.

I find inspiration in anything from fairytales, to the primal relationships between humans and nature, to dreams and current events.  Every fairytale has a dark side, the death of a parent, the loss of a power. In an era of social and political upheaval and environmental degradation, the dreams and fantasies of a childhood are shaped by these external forces.

In A Nursery Rhyme for You, I am attempting to both create a child-like fantasy world and to allow the harshness of reality to seep in.  When I make an image, I am very interested in exploring its underbelly.  It may look pretty on the outside, but perhaps there is more to it.  I want to both dwell on and delete some of the darkness in any given scenario, to try on a story for size, to understand what it might be like to exist in that moment and how to learn from it, but also leave it behind, as if in a dream.

1. Coronation: Queen of the Unicorns.

2. Country Bunny.

3. Menagerie

4. Her Kingdom Come

5. How Does Your Garden Grow?

6. Flowers at Forty

7. Migration.

8. Little Red

9. Playtime.

9. Heart of a Gardener.

10. Stay In Touch, Scarlet.

11. Stay In Touch, Aqua.

12. Medium

13. Eye of the Storm

14. Remember That I Love You, Madly.

15. At Your Service.

16.  Princess & the Pea.

17. Sail Away.

18. Shipwrecked.

19. Read Aloud

20. Brownie

21. Valentine

22. Changeling.

23.  Spirit Animal.

24. No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

25. Traveling Artist.

26. Flight of Wonder.

27. Hiding in the Stacks

28. In Search of Answers

29. Green Tea Party

30. Stories Told

31. Into the Woods

32. Bidding Farewell

33. On Such a Winter’s Day

The Playroom was a collaborative installation with artist and painter Ellen Green. It took place during the month of June 2019 in the 942 Pitner Warehouse as a part of a group show in which each artist was given a room to install work for a two month period. Ellen and I transformed a rundown office space into an dystopian fairytale of mother and childhood.

On the eve of my younger daughter's sixth birthday she was desperate to receive gifts, gifts and more gifts.  Overwhelmed by the rampant consumerism our culture promotes, I thought I'd examine the desire to have stuff,  how the psyche is affected when gifts are intended for someone else, the joy of receiving gifts, the joy of giving gifts, celebrations of life that don't require ownership of material belongings and what happens when someone else indulges in your gifts.  I aspire to a simpler life unfettered by the burdens of stuff and yet am constantly sucked down the rabbit hole of desire.

1. Not For You My Dear.

2. Birthday Girl.

3. Her Nemesis.

4.  Happy Birthday!

5. I'm Watching You.

6.  Overcome by Desire.

7.  I Didn't Do It.

8.  The Culprit.

As a girl I was a little lonely, a little obsessive and filled with a certain gapping longing for love.  I imagined when I grew up I would, as a single mother, have a hundred children.  Each would have long purple hair and dress entirely in shades of purple.  I’d chauffeur them about in my beat up stretch purple limosine and we’d live in a ramshackle clapboard house with a rickety picket fence brimming with a raucous sort of love.  Things have changed since then and my life didn’t turn out quite as unconventionally as I had hoped, but this desire to love and be loved has persisted as well as a certain sense of (often self-inflicted) loneliness.  In Maternal Nature I have begun to explore the essence of unconditional love between a parent and a child, a sense of being both surrounded by beings and deeply alone,  the awkwardness and self-possession of childhood and the comfort and self-exploration that can be found in a relationship with an inanimate object.

Flight plan is a constructed environment intended to invoke a sense of chance encounter, the potential of love and attraction, the magic of winter exploration and the possibilities of flight.  It is the story of Linus & Matilda and the forest of the winter songbird.  Over three years I letterpressed, painted and hand-stitched this world from worn out sweaters, blue jeans, vintage textiles and muslin using circles and lines as my compass . 

At the time that I began this project my two daughters were 6 months and three years old.  I had a fierce desire to protect them from the world and introduce them to it piece by piece.  I wanted to start with the slow magic and wonder of existence, to provide a shelter and a sense of steady expansion.  I wanted to share a certain foundation of possibility before they were steeped in contemporary reality and all that that entails.  This project came into being over the course of three years while my daughters slept.

The twelve trees shown here are swathed in handmade quilts using fabric from my father's childhood pajamas, my great-grandmother's moth eaten upholstery fabric, curtains from my aunt’s nursery, suiting from my grandmother's attic and a smattering of other fabrics.  Each quilt is hand-stitched and embroidered with a stanza of a poem about the winter songbird.  Perhaps you can hear the echoes of her song.

The Garage Project began in 2011 when, each morning, I would take my two small children and two large dogs on a long walk, exploring the alleys, streets and beach front of our town.  I spent a lot of time in the alleys.  Many of which were unpaved and had garages built in the late 1800.  The garages that had not been rebuilt or otherwise enforced were tumble down sheds layered with peeling paint, a pallet of history.  As we skipped through puddles, our boots muddy, I often felt transported back in time.  Each shed had a story, one I wanted to capture and tell before it was lost to weather and time.  And so began a journey of examining color and light, object and narrative.  In the years since I began this project many of these garages have been torn down, rebuilt or rehabilitated. There were some I failed to capture before their disappearance and many I still do not know about, but this is a glimpse into a time and place, the seed of which has allowed me to imagine so many other stories.