What persists?

This question is at the heart of my art making. From moment-to-moment in thought, sensation, and experience; to what persists when we die; to what persists over decades, centuries and millennia. Things aggregate—and fall apart—and yet we experience a kind of continuity. What is it that persists? Strongly influenced by my love of all things botanical, my decades-long meditation practice, and my past work as an archeologist, this question resonates through every aspect of my being.

I approach my work as a spiritual practice and love the physical act of mark-making, layering cold wax or acrylics, and working with the torch and molten wax in encaustic. Combining these media with oils, drawings, photocopies, ink, pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and found objects I work in multiple layers. I often dig into or scrape back layers of medium to expose traces of past moments that are surprising and delightful in how they reveal themselves and the marks of past activity. Encaustic and cold wax medium have become a major focus of my art-making since my introduction to encaustic 10 years ago.

The generation of these artworks is a way for me to fuse the different aspects of my life into beautiful objects that help awaken and focus my devotional practices, and my aspiration to be an agent of healing and kindness in the world.

History, story, traces…

A practicing artist since 1982, I graduated from Arizona State University in 1992 with an MFA in Fine Art Photography.  For more than a decade, I taught photography at institutions including Arizona State University, College of the Atlantic, and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. I was a participant in the Portland Grid Project, a systematic photographic essay of the City of Portland, one square mile at a time.   My photographic work—focused on gardens, plants, and our sacred relationship with them—continues with the use of pinhole cameras. I’ve always been fascinated with the traces of human behavior—both in the landscape, and the objects we leave behind--having worked in my first career as an archeologist in the Southwestern USA and in the Middle East.

My creative work has been included in numerous exhibitions in the U.S.A. and abroad, and is held in personal and public permanent collections including: Arizona State University Museum of Art; Women in Photography International Archive; College of the Atlantic; and the Nevada Museum of Art. My work was featured in an exhibition and book:  The Altered Landscape:  Photographs of a Changing Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, book published by Skira Rizzoli, 2012.