artist statement

I make art because I love stories. Ever since I can remember, I have loved stories-reading them, having them read to me, and listening to other peoples’ stories. I enjoy, no crave, the connections that stories create between people. For me, making art is the unfolding of a tale; an idea; an experience; a feeling; a beginning, middle, and end – it peels back the layers to reveal the essence of a thing.

   Just as a story slowly unfolds itself, so my artwork slowly forms a picture. Oodles of “first drafts” in designing the thing, lots of head-work occurs before my hands touch the tools. Once I have a basic storyline for a piece I tend to create as I go rather than having every detail planned out. I like to leave room for changes, mistakes, inspirations, and happy accidents. The process of making my art is as much the story as the final piece that represents the journey.

     Mosaics are a wonderful medium to express storytelling, in that I don’t know the outcome until the piece is complete. Up close the tesserae just look like random letters on the page; as a whole the pieces create a clear image. Since I hate being limited to one medium, mosaics offer me an endless variety of materials with which to express myself –handmade clay tile, glass, stone, beads, even recycled LP’s and CD’s. In addition, I choose to work both two dimensionally and sculpturally. Each type of material is like a different character or quality in the story I create.

     Creating art helps me express my inner world- the playful, serious, sexy, fun, and painful parts of myself that cannot be expressed in any other way. My art is my story.

Read.