Artist’s Statement

When I move further away in time from the experience of working on a piece in the studio, I have more to say about it. Building a verbal understanding of what is important in the pieces is a separate process from guiding their evolution in the studio. Depending on when you ask, I have more or less faith in that thinking’s relevance. But usually I believe that my reflecting on them can give viewers different ways of connecting with the work.

I do believe that somehow in the processes happening in the studio my understandings of the world and my priorities are revealed, sometimes as much to me as to others. I think in looking at art you can see patterns and forms that can be ways to understand the experience of life.

Two ideas have seemed to live in my work for a while:

--true wholeness is an ongoing breaking and healing, not the absence of hurt,

--the holy lives in the grit of the everyday.

I wish I had a poetic voice to say more about those thoughts when I write. In the past I have sometimes borrowed the words of poets to connect with the work.

A thought I am interested in exploring with my work now is standing at an edge, looking beyond. Some of the forms are meant to remind me of gates and windows. A boundary I connect with those thoughts is the edge of life.The most recent work makes some connections with a bird-like form that is dry and hollow and with the sky and flying. I’m not sure how important it is that you know that or see that, but that thinking shapes some of the decisions I make.