Paintings

Essentially, my work is concerned with evoking spiritual states. It is a devotional and mystical practice. I trace by hand, combine and alter ornamental patterns from many cultures into seductive, labyrinthine spatial experiences. I take my inspiration from mostly non-Western patterns that celebrate a diversity of form, often acting as veils and screens to another consciousness. Through a sensuous and extravagant beauty, my paintings also embrace a feminine intelligence and power that is healing medicine and an antidote to the patriarchy.

I make my art on the floor. The trance-like patterns become densely layered on the mylar, a surface which allows for translucency and reflectance. The process invites a meditative slowness. The acrylic inks are alternately reflective, metallic, matte, transparent, and opaque. As one views and moves through the room, the ambient light shifts one’s spatial experience as parts become illuminated or disappear/recede. In my solo shows I also include floor drawings sometimes made of colored sand/glitter or silver tape & satin/sequin fabrics in conversation with the paintings on the walls. This is to heighten a viewer’s spatial, perceptual, and bodily awareness. The floor drawings also refer to Tibetan sand mandalas, Indian Rangoli, & Haitian Veve, and invoke the higher spirits.

The work is both grounding & ethereal, intimate & expansive.

In taking these sacred, coded decorative languages into a new combination, I traverse fluid boundaries, borders, and identities, exploring their interconnections and points of contact. The essence of my work is to elevate the feminine and the sacred in a time that our world desperately needs both. By opening poetic contemplative space, my work triggers the imagination, sparks and builds bridges between inner and outer worlds.

Collage/Prints

These images transport us into the logic of dreams. They are meant to be places of the mind, little worlds unto themselves. The imagery is constructed through juxtapositions, revealing divergent systems and their points of contact. Like fairy tales, each springs from the subconscious but based on the specifics of real places and textures far and near, exotic and mundane. They induce travel as a state of mind, and suggest the simultaneity of cosmic events.

These digital prints are but a few samples from a large body of work. Each print is made from original hand-made collages which themselves exist on their own page in a hardbound book. This body of work began in 1997 and has been steadily ongoing since. There are currently over 1,000 collages in a total of 12 books. The intention for their final form is as Ultrachrome digital prints, in limited editions of 10, using archival inks on watercolor paper, measuring 11” x 14”. Each original collage is made as quickly as possible so as to access a non-linear, non-rational thinking and decision-making process through speed.