Matchstick Weavings, 2025
This series continues to deconstruct my monotypes, cutting them into small squares and "matchsticks" and weaving them into small individual works and then assembling into “nests.” The process adds layers to the original work's themes of identity, incorporating the roles I've held - mothering, teaching, caregiving, artist - and the art historical and visual culture references I've been drawn to in these roles, from Star Wars to the Nasca lines. Through this tactile, small-scale process, I continue synthesizing and reassembling identity.
These small woven clusters are communities: supporting each other in precarious but resilient arrangements. The matchstick-like pieces reflect both fragility and potential power. Each piece works on its own as an artwork, but are powerful and complex together in relationship and interdependence.
Weaving, historically women’s work and often dismissed as “craft” rather than “fine art,” carries its own critique of patriarchy. In these works, weaving becomes a structure of resistance and community. Built into little “nests” and presented with a designer’s attention to spatial relationships, the pieces reflect how we navigate the spaces we inhabit, the places we travel, and the daily rhythms of the roles we hold in life with attention and care.
Sentences, 2023-2025
This accompanying series extends my monotype practice into language itself, transforming them through cutting and reassembling into an alphabet of color, structure and shape. These are arranged in grids and lines, creating compositions that mimic the visual rhythm of text, maps, streets while abandoning literal meaning. Separated from their original context and reassembled into something new, the language operates through relationships and references— color, form, and spacing. They also take on new meanings and form—architectural, alphabetical, gestural while conforming to the rigidity and order of line and grid.
Cohesion is both imposed and emergent, reflecting the overwhelming but generative nature of complex ideas—a metaphor for living itself, with its connections, relationships, and risks taken. Dismantling what was there before to rebuild into something new. Shedding one set of meanings for others.
Monotypes, 2019-present
This monotype series draws from the cultures that have shaped me through formative years spent in Hawaii, Nigeria, and Japan, along with family roots in the Netherlands and Sweden. Using both traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques, I blend visual elements from these cultural and design legacies and with influences from mid-century women artists, particularly those connected to my Midwestern roots in industrial and furniture design.
Through monotype's inherent layering and unpredictability, I create new visual narratives that reflect these diverse cultural influences through my own lens. This process is an ongoing engagement with questions of influence, appropriation, and ownership—wrestling with how to celebrate and honor communities I have been a part of and identities I have held while remaining authentic and having the work be my own. The work exists in the tension between homage and transformation, using the monotype to mirror the complex, layered nature of identity itself.
Handbags, 2022-2023
What holds value? What gives value? How do we equate value? And how does a whole system assign value—what it inflates, props up in contrast to what it degrades? What signifies true value? Does one value beat out another? And if so, why? How? Currently I am creating a line of haute couture handbag sculptures—vessels that convey everyday life as well as status, wealth, position. Choosing specific “It” bags from various eras and design houses, I recreate them as sculptural forms with the humble elements of cardboard, newspaper, mache, and acrylic paint. Value is created using the modest medium of mache through time consuming labor of recreation, interplaying with the idea of scarcity– a tool used by the fashion industry and art world to signify value. I consider this work feminist in endeavor, engaging with roles culture has created for women. Fashion can be an elitist, sexist endeavor, but also a place for endless exploration of craft, artistry and creativity. Also mixed up in metaphor, culture and meaning, these pieces work as signifiers for women’s bodies, valued for being pleasing to the eye or as vessels for containment of others. I chose this media from the realm of craft, placing focus on women’s work and acknowledgment of teacher as practitioner in fine art, both maligned in traditional art realms. Elevating fashion, craft, women’s bodies to realms long dominated by patriarchal systems, the work is also playful, fun, yummy—in both process and product—and borderline absurd in endeavor. It has allowed me time to live in questions, engage with identities and roles I’ve held and continue to hold, and revel in the fun of creating.
Photography: Places on Film ongoing explorations in slowness and depth
For the last twenty five years, I have toted around a 1958 Rollexflex with a 3.5 Tessar Zeiss lens. Working in film and with a waist level viewfinder creates a slowness and connection to my subject matter, adding a layer of thought and depth to the work, in contrast to the fast paced nature of my work with digital cameras. I build on that in my choices of subject matter, exposure and settings and in the choices I make to actually slow down and choose to shoot. I also use it when I travel, and the camera itself is a community builder with strangers approaching, either curious or to share a story surrounding their own memories of similar cameras. I love how the camera and what it represents is an object of art and aesthetic experience, as well as evoking nostalgia or another way of life, which there seems to be a universal longing for.
OH AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY IN PRACTICE… I do have some thoughts on education and the arts as well. Here is a link to something I mused on during my Education for Sustainability Leadership Fellowship Cohort at Shelburne Farms about centering the arts in schools and the possibilities for transformational change.