Artist Statement

I have a love of nature, sound, and cultural reference. My work has reflected on the universal themes of regeneration and decay, age and mortality, fear and the sublimity of natural phenomena, chaos and resolution, perceptual and conceptual space as developed in intimate hand held objects or site-specific installations.

To that end my work combines art with ecology, history and the shape of the language. Interacting with media collaborators, I produce installation elements that become visual metaphors, reflecting upon inner life and considering ways to provide grounds for optimism. Capturing narratives I focus on transformations that serve as witness to the virtual world collision with the immanent resistance of physical life.

Believing that the new media alternatives have their ancestry in the white of paper and the essence of celluloid, I use the essential information carriers of paper and electronic media as my expressive materials. Through the transformative qualities of these materials, I am interested in investigating where the visible and invisible lay side by side.

Since paper is the source that has carried the information load for as long as there has been an information load to carry, part of the load now is the examination of the environment in which new carriers are developed. Looking at the phenomena that are encouraged by the transparency of new media, we can no longer park our critical faculties at the door. Suspension of disbelief gives way to supervision of disbelief, so that alternatives can be accommodated managed, and incorporated into our own narrative interests and histories.

The prevalence of research and resources, including the influx of great photo-based work being done in America combined with viewing installation works exhibited at international art fairs, have greatly infused a new collective experience that I see penetrating the world of printed media - both artists books, prints and three dimensional applications. In my most recent artistic practice, I am focusing on as well as teaching, the making of artist books as a creative springboard. The stages of development in using a digital camera, various software programs, and new media allow a unique opportunity for narrative inclusion. In several of the books my particular narrative deals with the identification of the self as an instrument of the environment -the contemplation and witnessing formed by my responses to a particular site. It is unlikely that these works could be created by traditional printmaking means simply because the speed of recovery would be different from what the moving image and electronic alterations are capable of producing. The present we are living through constantly disperses itself and directs us to other not immediately recognized presences. The book as an object occupies a place that simultaneously becomes a metaphor for places we seek for and carry within ourselves.

The artist book regardless of the form it assumes is in essence based on the episodic and sequential character of time and space; and the digital scanner and image manipulation taken to printing create opportunities for important visual layering to advance that space. Words play a large part for me in the inter media experience because they convey a point of reference and a perilous challenge at the same time. Language can open self-referential meaning into numerous points of similar or vastly different reference for the reader. As new technologies increasingly introduce new modes of understanding and experiencing the world, points of reference becomes all the more intriguing.

The starting point is always to some degree a mess of chaotic information and experiences that need to be tied together. I search for recognizable factors in the domain of visual images and textural information linked together unconditionally. I often use mirrored words to show concerns for polarities of our personal and plural lives. In 1973, my first one-women exhibition "Hei Guys / Hay Guise" took place in the Henie Onstad Museum, Norway, at the same time that Christo was exhibiting drawings for "Running Fence" in another gallery of the museum. I had the opportunity to meet Christo at that time, and earlier in the mid 1960's while a student at RISD, to print for the post-modern master Dieter Roth, who used his own poetry in artist-made books. These artists confirmed for me a structure that I continue to use. By assembling various types of repeatable matrices (a printmaking system) my hope is to connect universal collective memories into visual and verbal context. In the end art for me is a door to cognitive freedom. In the age of virtual reality there seems to be no more stable point of reference than our imaginations and ourselves.