Blackfish Gallery, Portland Oregon

2014

The short of it is fairly simple: Chicks, Veggies and Home.

My interest in making basket forms arose out of a long period of not living the lifestyle that they iconically represent for me. Whether you use a basket to gather food, to display seasonal flowers, or to store precious or mundane things, your use of it indicates habit, ritual, cycle, settling, permanence and home. At the end of a fourteen-year period of frequent moves and upheavals, of living in places I could never bring myself to call “home,” I got to thinking about, well, baskets.

In making these baskets, I employ imagery that directly references both the female body and, in a related way, gourds, nuts and other engorged fruits and vegetables. The food obsession rose out of the relatively recent discovery that I love growing my own food, which is part of that larger idea of home. The feminine forms rose initially from an interesting personal reflection: I appreciate, love and feel an awareness for my body more now, at 33, than I did ten years ago, when I was young and hot and bulletproof.

The Babe Eat Yer Veggies at Home gig celebrates the fullness and intrigue of an all but enclosed volume, as well as a sensual, feminine sense of elegance and mystery. It speaks to our life stories, as they are written on our skin, in our muscles, our bones, our eyes. It embraces us chicks in all our variety, including our age, weight, scars, freckles, tattoos, moles, stretch marks, grey hairs, veiny hands, zits, wrinkles and birth marks. It’s about reveling in all those things that make us women, and beautiful, and alive, and human.