Portfolio : current work
Link to Artist Statement & Bio
The Milky Way (Folded) The Very Old and Very Young
This still-in-process series makes a simple combination referenced in the title to stretch our vision to feel the immense age of the stars and the blink-of-an-eye life of things here on Earth.
The series uses white ink painted tracings from a type of historical celestial chart that represented the Milky Way cut into thirds to better show it in detail. This is overlaid with clustered images from vintage illustrations re-printed on archival washi paper, cut and mounted on the handmade Japanese paper support. Approx. 24×44″
Big – Little – Tiny
This series combines three ‘things’ of vastly different dimensions on sheets of 28×44” handmade paper: The Milky Way is brush-drawn in white ink across the sheet. Its particular form is drawn from a specific historical depiction. The Earth is presented through parts of historical maps or sky charts. The field created by both these things is inhabited by a genus of the tiny creatures that live here (a different one for each drawing).
Related to the unpacking of our human-centric valuations of “Infestations”, “Big-Little-Tiny” embraces the preciousness of these things: Some are too large for most humans to grasp, while others are dismissed as small and inconsequential.
28×44″ Ink and historical map and biological illustration elements on handmade Japanese paper.
Infestations Series
We don’t have infestations of wildflowers or flamingos. Infestation implies vermin… but it’s a human value judgment that a species is vermin or a weed. They are in the way or un-beautiful… or destructive to what we’ve decided to value. But from outside a human view, they’re simply living, even thriving. Oblivious to our preferences.
In this series I have combined my meditative ink line-shapes with edited prints of (mostly) birds of prey from Audubon’s nineteenth century catalog of American birds. The birds squabble or devour their prey sitting on or between the black ink elements, oblivious to them. You could take the view that either element could be an infestation of the other, but given human tendencies, the birds are the more likely culprits.
The ink is painted on Arturo paper and cut leaving a narrow border of pale blue. The birds are printed on lightweight Red River paper, all mounted on Rives BFK. (All papers are archival and compatible). The full sheet collages are 19×22” and the narrow vertical format is 13×22”
Below are two of the Vertical versions.
Wild Rivers
In “Wild Rivers” I map some of Earth’s rivers in a decorative, rambunctious way with titles full of personality… using human love of things sparkly and charming to suggest these rivers are alive… but under the playfulness is a connection to old cultures’ honoring of the sanctity of Earth’s waters.
Earth’s Rivers Depart
In this Ink and cut paper series, I was pushing what I could do with this diaphanous Chinese calligraphy paper (called “Cicada Wing” paper)… painting the river in reverse on the back… attaching Indian marble paper on front and other papers on the reverse. They are fragile, but that’s part of their presence.
The title outlines a fiction: what if the planet becomes so inhospitable to it’s waters that they just up and leave? What if they just got fed up with human predation and misuse? The anthropomorphizing is tongue in cheek, but the Earth’s waters are definitely not happy.
Below: The Ganges, The Mississippi, and The Nile
Birds are Missing
The photographs of birds in this series repurpose nine photos from a site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that focused on human imposition of value on different species according to our narcissistic views of them. These purebred racing pigeons against a clear blue sky were installed above on the ceiling, while photos of common rock doves (city pigeons) littered the floor in dingy, dark tones.
Although these are hand-reared pigeons, they read well as “every bird”. In these collages, I assail the flying birds with swirling elements from Indian Marble Paper and my own Ink marks, visualizing them in crisis, in danger.
The title references the drastic drop in bird populations, but with an anxious, personal voice… not dry data or statistics… Because I am anxious. We all should be anxious for all the missing birds.
8″ diameter, giclee print on watercolor paper with sumi ink and Indian Marble Paper elements. Series of 9.
Velocity of Dreams
One thread through my practice is working from an unapologetically female position. I have made work about our bodies “Vulva Series” and about our experiences “Madwomen & Murderesses.” In these series, the small format carries intense, almost cloying decorative patterns. Intentionally “hyper-feminine,” they push a feminine voice past what feels like “acceptable limits.”
The title shifts things for me… to the privacy of our dream-scapes… evoking an aspect most of us don’t gauge—their speed and movement.
A small format “series of series”, each series of 4 shares the same pattern ground. Collaged onto that are my black ink strokes and small ball-elements cut from Japanese Chiyogami paper. Each: 9 x 12″
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Visions Obscure my Vision
It often feels like our ability to see…our life, the world, the universe… is just out of reach. We can perceive glimpses of what might be Truth or Reality through the noise of our fears, hopes and other shifting illusions; but consistent clarity is not possible. This series of 10 collages combines prints of 5 meticulously observed moons from history with roiling, flowing shapes of my own ink marks and colorful cut-outs of Indian marble paper. The moons are printed in soft tones to recede… but the structure of the maps are quite present and hold the whole together.
Each of the five moons is used twice to create pairs that can be shown together or not. Media: Collage: reproductions of maps of the moon (1704-contemporary) printed on Unryu Inkjet washi, mounted to Magnani 300g/m2 cotton paper; Overlayed with Sumi Ink brush strokes (painted on Arturo text, cut out and adhered) and Indian marble paper. Each, 12.6” diameter.
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Vulva Series
The first time I saw another woman’s vulva was when I was 5… It was a photograph of the Venus of Willendorf (The 5” stone carving from 30,000 BCE.), looking at an art history book with my dad. She didn’t look like me, huge breasts and round, faceless head, but we shared a hairless little crotch with a centered fold, a line.
“Vulva Series” takes my early, little girl’s imprint of my own and all women’s anatomy and boils it down to that single, vertical “line” and pairs it with gilded shapes that indirectly, almost secretly express the pleasures and pressures… the depth and complexities of living a female body…
Ink and Palladium gilding on Bicchu Torinoko Gampi paper. 16 x 22″
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Shodo Terra
Shodo Terra (Ink Drawing Earth) combines three registers of “information” evoking three vastly different “timelines.”
–Calligraphy approach to recording a river’s path. The fluid ink echoing (in microcosm) the paths of water over the planet = Earth’s Time.
–Physics Formulas from a basic Physics textbook referencing the “nature and properties of matter and energy” march along the paper forming a guiding line: The formulas = Cosmos Time.
–Penciled locations of the cities that sit along the river. The youngest and most frail marking of the earth, referencing our short time on this planet = Human Time.
Series 0f 6+, each: 6 x59″ Xerox, ink and graphite on Kitakata paper. 2018
Two Attempts:
1) To Understand the Culmination of the Moon, and
2) To Get Through this Cold Dark Winter
This is more a single piece of 14 parts than a series. Shown installed in my studio in the ideal configuration, with the Winter Solstice drawing at top and the Spring Equinox drawing at bottom.
The night sky or the darkness of the short winter day is the “shodo” here and lets in more page, or light, as the drawings move from Winter Solstice to Spring Equinox. Over this “backdrop” of the dark, I’ve tried to lay out the “Culmination” of the Moon: its highest point on that night. The Culmination is the highest point the moon reaches as it moves in the sky overnight. It reaches higher or lower depending on the season, but I could not find a clear explanation anywhere… And I still don’t really understand it. The “second attempt” is getting me through the darkness of the winter… Often a project or creative endeavor is really about getting us through the day, week, or year as much as it is creating our next masterpiece.but it helped with the winter…
14 drawings, 6×8″ Ink, graphite and palladium leaf on handmade paper with gold leaf inclusions. 2018
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Passing Moments: Constrained
There is a meditative practice sometimes called “First Stroke” in which you center yourself, become present, then make your brushed mark… before thinking, before the intellect, ego or inner critic can intervene. Perhaps a first cousin to automatic writing, the ink drawing arises more from the unconscious, or perhaps the whole person, rather than from the sliver focused on final product or external acceptance.
This is a series of 6 “First Stroke” ink paintings on Japanese paper. Part of the mark(s) are chosen to be elevated and “constrained’ in a rectangle of gilding, yet we see drops and other marks poking out from the edges of the gilded area. …Creating a tension between the fluid freedom of the ink and the restraint needed in prepping and gilding paper. …Contradicting the valuing of the “First = Best” premise by editing the ink and elevating the chosen parts with precious metal. The gilded rectangle situates the stroke in a composition… and so–while placed squarely on the sheet–is not necessarily centered on it.
Series of 6. Each sheet: 11 x 15″ Bichu Toriniku handmade paper (17 g/m2), with 9×12″ area gilded in Double Dukat gold leaf. 2018
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