statement

I have been making collages since I was six years old. After my first attempt, I was scolded for cutting up my parents’ magazines and getting glue on the dining room table (otherwise, my artistic paths were always wholeheartedly encouraged.) Undaunted and now in mid-career, collage is still my favorite medium and form of meditation. This mindset ripples out across the collecting, categorizing, and filing of my source materials (subject matter, color, era, etc.), and down into the cutting, composing, and editing of my collages. My file cabinets overflow with botanical prints, anatomy charts, star maps, vintage beefcake magazines, old letters, and bits of foxed and mildewed papers. I keep small flat-files for separating the pre-cut body parts, bits of drapery from art history books, snakes and birds. There's a tin on my work table for all the used X-acto blades. For three decades I’ve worked primarily with anatomical and medical imagery, drawn to the human body for several reasons: we’re all familiar with the territory; we come in such a wide array of variations; and we’re capable of gorgeous contortions. My fondness of illustrations of disease and surgeries comes from a sense of our hubris that we’ve contained so many unseen forces, when in reality we are so vulnerable and feeble, and so many of us lack the ability to intuitively comprehend our own bodies in distress. Now, in the fading world of analog media, we are as temporal as the decaying paper we were printed on or the life of a battery charge, but these old images can be resuscitated. Recently, my collages have pulled me out to the body’s surface and its relationships with the patterns and spaces it moves through. This has evolved even further with the creation of untethered, un-human life forms, floating and billowing in dark places, either giants of the deep or microscopic menaces.

I love working in collage because of its inherent nose-thumbing of context and intention; both can be reassigned with the flick of a sharp blade and a smudge of glue stick. Original meaning disappears when I merge delicate flowers with the innuendo of porn or fuse hard, sharp glass with a mane of delicate satin. I take great glee in creatIng fluid Baroque arabesques of sinew, stem, and flowing fabric, and my inner Dr. Frankenstein smiles at the newly formed creature on the table before him.