Artist Statement

As a poet, I come to art to experience the language of materials, not to reject words, but to ground their inherent abstraction in matter. As an artist, I attempt to create visual poetry – work that has movement, breath, metaphor, layering, and mystery.

As a cross media artist, I use a range of materials and methods. As an interdisciplinary artist, and as a poet interested in enlivening my relationship with language, I explore poetic form through the creation of a contemporary sacred script. Bridging the unconscious with daily awareness, I seek to narrow the gap between the body’s intuitive knowledge and a calloused cultural script. I explore ways of animating text in materials, so that it’s meaning is enhanced through physical manipulation. The content of my work is largely autobiographical and stems from dreams, meditation, memory and spontaneous play.

By way of a dialogue I have with materials—whether ceramic, glass, paper, wax, paint, light or sound, these elements become artifacts of self, and intermediaries in an environment I invent. The theme of fragmentation is given form through the use of text fragments and molded body parts, and relates to the theme of transformation alluded to within the changing materials, and in the pervasive use of fire, leaving it’s traces of smoke on the work.

Interwoven throughout [this] body of work is the written and recorded word. I see enlivening our relationship to language in the exploration of spontaneous vocal expression. As a poet, I attempt to create a language in which words become doorways to less prescribed modes of experience, more common to dreams and non-linear thought, and characterized by surprise shifts in perception. Along with traditional lineated verse, I make use of the fragment, prose poem, as well as spoken word and “sound assemblages.” I am interested in both content and form in text, though one may preside over the other in a given piece.

Through the unearthing of my personal mythology, or spiritual autobiography, I discover my own symbols and image vocabulary. And, though their images may not be directly encountered in my work, I have drawn inspiration from the Neolithic Bird Goddess, Etruscan womb imagery, Greek mythological bird women, as well as resonant modern and contemporary artists and writers. I often reference the bird, a universal symbol of freedom and transformation, as it is an active player within my psyche.