I was raised to be both skeptical and speculative, to both doubt and suspend disbelief. I was encouraged to immerse myself in stories of magic and faeries and simultaneously invited to detect the capitalist motives and status quo preserving strategies of Disney and the Magic Kingdom. I opened myself to the wonder of the stars at night and the complex web of life in the bed of a creek. I honed my skills at critical thinking.
I made a sock puppet theater and wrote plays, I built forts, created complicated scenes and tableaux with my toy soldiers and plastic models of cars, ships, and spacecraft. I had a model train. I drew. I painted. and had a multi-volume collection of cartoons from magazines. I wrote science fiction short stories. I loved miniatures for the way they sparked my imagination. It is from this milieu that I developed my sensibilities as an artist.
Parody and satire have been intuitive practices from my childhood. By third grade I was already using worldbuilding to satirize, imagining a polarized society of Lovers and Haters. Events were chronicled in the Lovhat Press which had only two editions. I recall almost none of the content except that there were both a Lover’s Leap and a Hater’s Leap. This kind of imaginative play with “reality” remains central to my work to this day.
Those plastic models, toy soldiers and Matchbox cars I collected remain a part of my practice. Along with hundreds of objects that I have collected since, they serve as elements in my assemblage and box art. That pleasure in worldbuilding continues to shape much of my work, both explicitly and implicitly.
I studied fine arts at Hampshire College (BA Applied Philosophy: Studio) and Stanford University (MFA Sculpture) and have taught visual art to adult college students for the last 35 years.
Artist Résumé
