My work is about finding a visual way to engage verbal ideas through sculptural mixed media, specifically fiber. I’m deeply interested in words, word usage and wordplay, and often use text and photographic images in my work to strengthen the visual expression, and to clarify the ideas I want to illustrate. Often, my work can be a sculptural exploration of verbal expression. In general, I make work that creates commentary and discourse about social issues, and the politics that enhances or inhibits them. I am fascinated by the differences between what is said, what is meant, what is not said, and what is distilled from it. Words have power, and, as Jenny Holzer famously remarked, “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”

In 2008, after a heart attack, I was diagnosed with some genetic issues with my heart that require ongoing management and medication, and made this the topic of my work as a way to understand both the condition, and the emotions that frequently take center stage. At the time I used my art practice to create a visual language for the places where words have failed me. To refer to Julia Kristeva’s influential statement about Abjection, I am attempting to come to terms with being “ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” and am worried that I might always be in the place where my health issues “cannot be assimilated.” I find myself in agreement with Kristeva’s statement that it is “not a lack of… health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.” These works are about trying to understand and assimilate a new identity that my health had insisted I create. I chose the hospital gown as a vehicle for expression and as a template for self-portraiture. I reinterpreted the gown in ways that illustrate specific facets of my health related emotions, and I see this garment-making as a way to express wearing, and thereby owning, these emotions. To quote Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Through the
Looking-Glass, “And now, who am I?” Who am I now that I inhabit this abject space outside the natural order of taking my good health for granted, and of known or proven solutions for what ails me? Who am I now that I must live within the confines of health induced limitations?

As I processed and recovered from the shock, I began to turn back into work that was more outwardly focused, back onto the more familiar socio-political work that interested me pre-heart crisis. Yet the personal interpretation has never subsided, and now my work is both commentary and personal experience at the same time.