Artist Bio
As an artist, I create visual narratives about identity, memory, and presentation, both personal and societal. History, time passages, social/cultural/aesthetic transitions, and aesthetic traditions are strong interests. As a child of hoarders, I'm a hunter of vintage ephemera and photos, passionate about researching, acquiring, comparing, and contrasting back then and now. Context, comparison, and contrast are key. Content is often a driving force. Sparking on an image, its inspiration leads me on a treasure hunt to explore its world; literature, events, songs, other people, etc., which I then connect to our world now. Not relying solely on photographic realism, I experiment with different modes of expression. This might include different media; monoprints, digital manipulations, unusual cropping, transfers, symbols, and other ways of expressing a subject’s true reality. This usually leads to many layers, both conceptually and literally, which I hope leads viewers on a path to finding their own meaning or narrative within my work.
In my piece MATERNAL INSTINCT I depict two sets of mammal mothers with their offspring in the ocean (a place I find mysterious and rather scary). Both duos appear bonded and are protectively touching. The humans are my grandmother and my young mother. Floating above them is a whale with her calf. But where a whale relationship might be more or less as simple as it appears, human bonds are always more complicated than they look. I wonder what connections we have in common with other mammals in our family situations, what’s instinctive, what’s learned? Photos of my mother and her mother fascinate me. I ponder how her mother impacted the woman and mother she became. And ultimately how that relationship connected to my relationship with my mother and how that impacted the person I am today.