STATEMENT OF WORK

I make painted paper pulp sculptures, ceramics, and paintings inspired by my experiences in the garden working with earth, rocks, and organic matter. As I tend to my backyard meadow, I gather sensations to channel into the work, which describes a verdant, potent terrain. My interest is in the materiality of the landscape—its texture, weight, pattern, and gesture—and the associations it evokes. The garden is a metaphor for life’s intensity, beauty, and precariousness. I am in constant wonder at the visceral richness and strangeness of the natural world.

My work in sculpture developed organically after years of creating site-based paintings about human intrusions into the landscape. Those paintings considered the landscape as a vista, an image on a picture plane. Once I began to garden, I was no longer a tourist but a participant. Nature was suddenly materially alive and multi-sensory, and my need to describe that experience sculpturally became clear.

I work on loose muslin, creating wall hangings with sewn elements painted with natural images and patterns, and build sculptures reminiscent of rocks, celestial orbs, seed pods, and tree branches. For me, pods and stones represent invisible potency, while a branch is a gesture connecting parts and energizing the whole. I create small clay sculptures and mold wet paper pulp over armatures, pushing material into animate form. Pieces are built from the bottom upward, like plants growing toward the sky. Surfaces are coarse and ragged, like a pasture, a mountain range, or a leaf. I use color and pattern to add visual dimension, applying paint in loose gestural brushstrokes, dashes, and lines. Paint drips and flows down the rough texture of the form like streams in the landscape. My intention is always to animate an object, to coax it into expressing the abstract story it contains.