Bio
I create prints, artist books, digital images, installations and video works. I received my BFA degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (1978) and my MFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1981). My work has been exhibited in one-woman, international print biennials and triennials, invitational, group and juried shows. My prints are found in numerous museum, libraries, private and corporate art collections in the United States and abroad.
In 2018 I retired from my academic position at Duke University of thirty-three years in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. I now work full time as an artist in my studio, loving my second life and thriving on every creative and productive moment. My print studio is adjacent to my home in Durham, North Carolina, which looks out onto the Eno State Park. My two Vizslas, Gus, the most energetic dog in the world and Aurora (Rory) who feels obligated to talk every time I’m on the phone, are the best studio assistants one could ever have. They do sleep a lot on the job, however.
Artist Statement
I am continually searching for cues and connections that convey the balance between nature, humankind and our shared space. Using maps, natural forms, patterns and symbols, I create work in different formats that include prints, works on paper, artist books, installations and collaboratively made videos. My images reveal nature’s fragile balance with its human counterpart, with the elements of landscape and topography being ever-present in my work. Nature’s beauty, force and destruction is abstractly depicted through organic lines and naturally occurring patterns that include branching patterns, grids, circles, squares, rectangles, targets, spirals, and tessellations.
I am also drawn to written communication that use extinct characters or ones that are unreadable to me. Exclusive of my work done in collaborative undertakings, my prints celebrate the beauty and graphic qualities of signs, glyphs and written forms. I merge these marks with aspects of calligraphy, typography, lines, patterns, and shapes into an amalgamated written language of my own. My abstract forms, customarily contained within an entangled matrix, allude to signs and systems that are almost legible and familiar in their characters. Yet, they are as unreadable as any unfamiliar glyph. Through layering, I create unique combinations of visually patterned “tapestries”, resulting in rich, actively woven surfaces that suggest hidden codes and messages.
Being highly aware of the communicative qualities of the signs and glyphs, my primary focus is on form, movement and context. My use of interwoven organizational systems and coding reflect my interests in urban planning, architecture, cartography and methods of way finding. The pathways found within my grids are unending, creating labyrinths with no exits. Like my cryptic letter forms, the mazes emphasize the complexity of my imagery, its formal qualities and the challenge of decoding enigmatic written systems.
My artistic practice focuses on relief printmaking, with my detailed woodcuts employing calligraphic marks, lyrical lines, patterning, grids, ideograms and icons to create an abstract language that alludes to signs, writing systems and codes that are almost legible, and familiar. I combine botanical, ecological, geologic and historical references particular to my specific locality. These resources all depicting ways information is impressed, drawn, carved, burned and scratched into a surface. My prints evoke the viewer’s curiosity, capture their visual and intellectual wonderment and demand to be read as a map, landscape, or visual text that must be decoded through imaginative interpretation.
Through every stage of my image development, I focus on the manipulation of my surfaces. I incorporate my printing process into making different iterations of my ideas, and thus expand upon my initially envisioned piece. My prints have evolved into unique pieces with no natural focal point. The viewer’s eye “flows” continuously throughout the expanse of pattern and form, following the lines and seeing a variety of intricate structures and relationships.