My work is shaped by two seemingly opposing impulses: transformation and containment. I trace both to my grandmothers and the very different worlds they created.
One transformed whatever was available into something else—quilts from old clothes, hats from milk cartons, even silver chalices from gum wrappers. Her world was crowded, emotional, excessive, and full of making. My other grandmother created a world of quiet, restraint, and order. Everything was carefully maintained and contained. As a child, I experienced that order as a form of safety.
Those early impulses followed me into art school and later to New York, where I lived from 1995 to 2002. I worked in fashion designing tossed prints for children’s clothing and later as a designer for Nickelodeon Digital Studios on Blue’s Clues. Looking back, those experiences reinforced a visual language already taking shape—one grounded in pattern, color, repetition, play, and design.
I now recognize both impulses throughout my work. For thirty years, I have moved between collage, painting, and fiber, transforming humble materials through repetition, pattern, ornament, and labor while imposing structure on imagery that can be psychologically charged. Houses, uniforms, portraits, landscapes, and animal bodies become containers—forms capable of holding competing ideas of strength and vulnerability, innocence and wisdom, beauty and mortality.
My recent fiber works draw from textile history, folk traditions, and the visual languages of domestic making. Hooked fabric, punched yarn, embroidery, appliqué, rope, fringe, and found materials are accumulated into highly ordered surfaces. Symmetry and ornament provide stability while animals, figures, and other forms inhabit and sometimes disrupt that order.
Across these changing materials and subjects, I have been creating stabilizing containers for emotional complexity—spaces where abundance and restraint can coexist.