I am a woman who grew up next to the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains of New York State, a world that has always called to me to enter its lures and risks.
My present work is influenced by ancient Babylonian friezes of brick which often depicted animals and the violent conquest of nature and how these records of extinction and control come forward to us in our own time of trouble. Those first city experiments were based on mining, primarily soil, and water, for the first large crops which depended on slavery and, at such an astonishingly early stage, conformity. I feel that civilization has so vastly expanded and made extraction the central issue of its survival that disappearance itself must be and will be dismissed. My desire is to bring a novel tension to these issues if we are going to have the multiple awareness necessary for the foundation of future alternatives.
To present this as visual facts, I combine many different materials into the forms the viewer sees here. For me, these forms invoke sudden, unexpected senses of transformation that, from our most basic origins, pose questions about how we might discover a home for the realities that give us a hold on our planetary lives, or not.
In addition, my earlier sculptures propose an examination of the human form with references to mythology, biology, and the crisis of identity about who and what we are. The sculptures are of clay and carved found pieces of trees and desert flora. I combine them into forms to create a movement from the human into the organic forms of nature and back again, inspired by stories and myths where there are sudden and unexpected transformations while trying to bring up the drastic separation that humans have with nature, and that we are no longer seeing or believing, as many previous cultures did, that everything is alive. When I select a branch to use, I try to see the forms growing out of it as I imagine and dream ancestral artists might have done when they carved animal heads and figures from pieces of bone or wood. At the same time, I include my own daily concerns with the political/feminist ideas about the body, its suggestions, implications, susceptibilities, and mortality.