Art begins with observation- where attention intersects intention and is followed by action. I endeavor to be active in the practice of noticing. 

I embrace the resources and circumstances I have been given, working to intuitively adjust my relationship with scarcity and abundance: a tree grows around a chain, a dandelion between cracks in pavement. Have we allowed survival to parade as greed and forgotten the basic skills of humanity? We promote paper pushing, and we neglect paper making. Collectively, we have lost the art of communication. We sit screaming into voids, overheating servers, melting icebergs believing ourselves to be independent of a structure that feeds our soul. We watch the world wither through a virtual reality, and we laugh when they say it’s all a simulation, but is it not? When was the last time you felt grass between your toes? The last time you identified the shuffling leaves correctly as a turtle slipping through the underbrush? When was the last time you felt real?

My work is created with the resources at hand. I am a mother of three; money and time are limited. We’ve given the market too much power in dictating what we value. Creators are led to believe that art and creativity depend on certain resources, only to then have those resources restricted. We have been told that belongings will slake our hunger when it is belonging that will satiate us. We need more soft art that feeds the soul, Art that speaks truth to trauma, with the beauty and space to hold it. 

I have come to understand, through the exploration in this work, that abundance is created through reciprocity, through recycling and reuse. Recognizing ‘enoughness’ can be a radical notion in an economy that encourages us to consume insatiably. Artists have spent lifetimes converting scraps into something magical, breathing new life into the discarded; not simply out of nobility or necessity, but in viewing the world through the lens of abundance. Meals, quilts, clothes, albums, pottery, and stories are just bits and pieces of things reassembled in a new way. It is when they start telling you what art isn’t that you should be wary.

My work attempts to blur the line between material and waste. I am often picking through the scraps on my desk, digging through the waste bin and saving bits and bobbles from the dustpan. Forever seeking treasures -ideas seem to come to me as something cast aside- begging to live a little longer. To linger. For me, this is the practice. Life is the art. What if you open your eyes and open your heart?

I enjoy layering callbacks in my work, both macro and micro. Everything is a circle; time, in the linear sense, isn’t real. My work references everything that has come before and everything I hope to be born again. At the end of the day, there is nothing to “get” in my work, but there is plenty being given. 

For further exploration I encourage you to read the works of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Gilbert and listen to the podcast, The Telepathy Tapes.