ARTIST STATEMENT
My work involves a continuous sense of wonder and exploration with materials, shape, form and translucency. The raw authenticity of natural materials is highly compelling to me. I stretch, burn, freeze and manipulate the different characteristics and warm colors of ancient mediums in nontraditional ways. The softness of warmed beeswax, the oiliness of wool, the translucent and heavenly scented honey, and even the slippery nature of sheep intestines, inform me as I work out conceptual issues of ephemeral moments in a human's life, including conception, metamorphosis and death. Most of the photographs I take are of forms that fascinate me in the natural world and farms surrounding my studio. I am fueled by birthing pens and the butchers knife when I turn to my "still life" ephemeral sculptures. There is a conscious decision in my process that the photographs are an end result and not a documentation of a sculpture that does not last. Gravity is a key player in my work and the isolation in black references solitude in the vastness of the universe.
Art for me is where science and the spiritual connect. It is the common thread found in all areas of my life, from my undergraduate anatomy studies, dissecting cadavers late into the night which initiated a lasting interest in the human body, to the awe inspiring act of growing and raising children that opened up an insatiable sense of wonder.
I am deeply influenced by New England-camping in the deep fog banks on the coast of Maine, raising sheep on a pastoral hillside in Massachusetts, hiking the Green Mountains in Vermont, or raising honeybees in my childhood fields of Connecticut. This is evident in the textures and colors of my photographs, sculpture and installations. It is my goal to entice the viewer into a world that taps into a primal instinct. Perhaps it’s the familiar and repetitive form of an organ, the smell of raw wool, or the translucency of dried intestines that takes the viewer to an unidentifiable place; an imaginative, internal, maybe ancient place. The teeth and hair from my children, love poems written to my husband, even the fur from the animals in our family all visibly or invisibly personalize my work and provokes a visceral recognition and an internal shift.