Statement

I construct garment-like forms. Using materials that go unnoticed or are quickly discarded, such as women's make-up sponges, festoon their densely embellished surfaces. Items such as window screen wire mesh, clothing fasteners, and Velcro become primary characters in their surface drama. When I group the forms together, they form an environment somewhere between a three-ring circus, immersive installation, and fashion designer’s workspace.  

I make everything by hand building intimate relationships with these inanimate objects. Casting small tangible units of zippers, hooks, and eyes that accrue like shared stories during a quilting bee, I develop techniques that enable me to see, literally, beyond the visible. Painting with a magnifying glass I spend endless hours gluing thousands of make-up sponges to canvas, coating their surfaces with soft pastel pigment before arranging them in undulating patterns and attaching them to the wall.

The sewing machine, my current tool of choice, becomes a drawing vehicle and means of attaching layers of fabric. By increasing and decreasing the machine's tensions, threads react to become glitches. At first glance they may be seen as blemishes, yet upon closer inspection the embellishments and details collaborate, creating highly detailed and ornate surfaces that are primarily abstract. The viewer enters a sensory world of boldly painted, textural, multidimensional compositions.

I learned the value of looking good and performing well early. I didn't understand then the importance of valuing emotions and thoughts that lay below the skin's surface – the unseen feelings. Art repairs the fractured internal and external selves. Initially in the process, my work appears formless, fragile, unresolved. Only when installed does it activate the bond between vulnerability and courage. Using forms as walls creates an architecture for the body to protect and divide. Visually manifested signposts for the many parts that comprise personal identity complicate the reflection of self within a collective enclosure.

By manifesting what was not initially understood my work becomes both mirror and door. Participation by others elevates my studio practice to the celebration of resilience.