Artist Statement

I make work about what is happening just beneath the surface of visible life: the cellular matrix, the architecture of decay, the slow dissolution of a body or a mind. I have described this to myself for years as making the invisible, visible.

Fibre is my primary material. Cloth is the substance that meets a body first and last, and I am interested in what it can be asked to hold. I work in woven and mixed textile, and alongside it in drawing, charcoal, cyanotype and photography, moving between them according to what a subject seems to want. Much of the work begins at close range, in the microscopic: cells, organisms, the structures that connect one living thing to the next. From there it opens outward into the concerns that keep returning, namely womanhood and matriarchy, life cycles, the reuse of discarded material, and consciousness.

I approach subject matter meditatively and think on things a long while before committing them to physical form. That pace is not incidental to the work. I am an artist with disabilities, and the way I work (slowly, in layers, returning and returning) is inseparable from the way I perceive, and from the questions the work asks about bodies that change.

I am also a Certified Death Doula, and that practice has become the research ground for much of what I make. I sit with people at the end of life and with the families who survive them. It has drawn me toward the history and materials of shrouding, and toward the possibility that an artistically rendered shroud might commemorate a particular life rather than simply cover a body. Decay runs in two directions in this work: as a material process I invite into the making, and as the subject of pieces concerned with dementia and aging. 

What I want from my finished pieces are emotions and forms that the viewer can recognize as something they have felt and held themselves, but had not yet been able to see.