Art is both personal and public, reflecting my personal values and reaching out to the community. I make a range of art from densely worked mixed media collages to monumental public sculptures. Consistent throughout my work is a desire to invite the viewer to explore deeper, to understand human experience in a larger, more unconventional way, and to reformulate the conventions of everyday language. In my mixed media collage-paintings, I am concerned with discovering or uncovering connections between the human experience and the 'body' of the earth. Many of these works are meditations on the female form, in relation to things such as water, maps, and curving pattern pieces. Geologic formations, wave patterns, and animal images often evoke figurative forms. The work grows organically as all the disparate bits solidify into cohesive whole figures, but upon closer inspection, small worlds are revealed. As we focus in on the details, hidden connections are discovered. The experience of looking at the artwork is similar to that of looking at a meadow; we see the lay of the land, the big relationships; then lying down to study the soil close up, we discover a small busy world of insects, roots, and moist earth. Within this microcosm it seems another universe exists. My work examines the internal and external processes of life in the form of the otherworldly and 'irreal.' In it I seek to reorganize and recontextualize the way we understand things. The materials I choose for my collages lend themselves to making these connections between parts of our universe. The photomontage element in my work is a way I can satisfy my urge towards three-dimensionality. Photographs stand in for actual objects or architectural spaces and allow me to make comparisons between vastly differing scales. The manipulation of scale alters perspective. In the collage, The Bird in the Hand, a worker dyes cloth in large vats within the space of a fingernail. I use maps, diagrams, and sewing pattern pieces. Diagrams and schematic drawings intended to show how things work fascinate me. I begin using them for their formal qualities such as color and texture, but their intended meanings further enrich the collages. Because the function of sewing patterns is to create body coverings, they easily make reference to the human body. Layered onto painted and photographed images the patterns have a skin-like translucency. I often use translucent papers and glazes to veil underlying images, implying that under the surface there may be a different and mysterious meaning. Lists, dictionary pages, sacred writings, and other texts are chosen both for their texture and meaning. Language is a human construct, a kind of map that we use to frame the world, to mediate and understand experience. I take bits and remnants of our analytic written diagramming of that understanding, giving them a non-verbal context. Through my collage paintings I hope to create a sense of expanded self, a spatial extension of self, in which the human vascular system includes arteries, veins, rivers, oceans and air currents. The interpenetration between self and the world-body is an essential element of human consciousness, often missing in 'civilized' life as we further remove ourselves from the natural world and its forces. My public sculptures
are site- specific; the location gives rise to my ideas. They are commissions,
and are collaborative in the sense that I create them specifically with the
community and special purpose in mind. I use bronze and cast metal, often for
realistic interpretations. The bronze elements emerge from stone or concrete
bases that become integral to the whole. My design and placement reflects how
I want viewers to move through and experience the sculpture. For example in The
Language of Stone, a series of
sculptural groupings created for the Great Lakes Aquarium, I placed boulders
within an empty plaza area, connecting them with a curving pathway of river
rock. Visitors are drawn along the pathway. The boulders are heavily textured
and striped basalt excavated from under the city of Duluth, site of the
aquarium. Within the rich surface of the ancient boulders, I embedded bronze
trout, chromed herring, a turtle, beavers and sturgeon. They 'swim' in the
rock matrix. People interact with and touch the work, and discover small
elements within the whole as they walk through the plaza. This piece draws a
parallel between stone, symbolic of great duration, but bearing the traces of
its fluid origin; and water, the medium of life itself. The title, The
Language of Stone, speaks to
the fossil record, the traces of past life, and the stories we humans gather
from these remnants. |