ARTIST STATEMENT

…drifter, hot walker, gardener, groom, educator, truck driver, secretary, computer technician, independent business owner, wife, technologist, sign maker, waitress, cook, scholar, handy woman, artist, librarian …

My works are informed by early years spent traveling extensively and working my way across the United States. I have lived on the beach, on the Yakima Indian reservation, and on the “backside” of the Englewood race track.  I have been a wandering, misguided youth, a computer technician, a technical writer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a long haul truck driver…and now a librarian, artist, and professor.  This collection of life experiences provided the foundation for me to accumulate the skills, knowledge, and dedication to develop my principles, interests, and my own approach to artistic expression.

My practice is built around the process of exploring the symbolic representation of socially accepted and culturally agreed upon understandings. I often revisit themes of place, nostalgia, documentation, collection and the construction of self and culture.  My process is often modeled upon anthropological fieldwork, asking questions about the relationship between the individual and society.  This is often an iterative process of repeating the question in different media until I find a satisfying answer.  

A common thread in my work has been the integration of technology and traditional media to experiment with methods of reproduction and recontextualization.  Through cyclical questioning and the reuse of imagery, I create modular, circuitous designs that can be recombined in different ways.  Something fixed is no longer relevant.  Employing abstraction and considering the functionality and associations that an object or image brings unveils the very real histories that they are often waiting to tell.  I find the highest art speaks the universal language of everyday life.