Artist's Statement

An incurable visitor to flea markets, antique shops, and used book stores, I had been compulsively accumulating unusual papers, maps, sheet music, faded photographs, old boxes, and found objects long before they began finding their way into my work. Indeed, at times, it seemed that they were collecting me, rather than me them. Like a message in a bottle in an unknown script, each of these scarred fragments seemed to have some urgent but unintelligible story to impart.

Gradually I discovered that through seemingly random juxtapositions with other remnants, handmade papers, fabric, and objects from nature, these mute fragments could be brought to speak their piece. Their language is nonverbal, pre-conscious, it’s lexicon made up of texture, color, image. It draws on sources in archaeology, autobiography, family, nature, place, and dreams, and mixes techniques of painting, printmaking, alternative photography, collage, and sewing. Each fragment, I found, is a potential doorway into those private spaces where perception, memory, and emotion intermingle, and where meaning and identity are forged.

My works are thus itineraries of these forays through private consciousness. Each contains a fragment of interior space infused with elements of longing, loss, the eternal quest for meaning and self, connection and isolation, memories, and the passage of time. For others, they may become access points into their own private spaces, points of departure for their own interior journeys.