Master of Arts in Art Thesis Exhibition

University of Dallas, 2008

Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition

Utah State University, 2011

As human beings we have an innate hunger for meaning and, not coincidentally, an interesting ability to assimilate patterns, to recognize working systems.  For all our ability to reason and assimilate, however, concrete answers to our questions of meaning and our hunger for understanding are elusive, vague and often lacking.

In my work I pursue a two-fold exploration.  On the one hand I want to express my fascination with that riddle of the human condition, of our need for meaning and our parallel inability to pinpoint it concretely.  On the other hand I am fascinated with the fact that our ability to assimilate and reason is not limited to a weighty existential crisis: we also celebrate that ability when we play games – we can figure things out for fun, and because we like to.  To keep grounded in that sense and celebration of play, I base my forms on the contours of unorthodox jigsaw puzzle pieces.  I then incorporate elements of scale, topography, surface, arrangement and imagery that highlight that original contour while simultaneously lifting it wholly out of its original context.  The enigmatic form that results is intended to pose an open-ended question to the viewer concerning the underlying meaning to an implied organization.

An immediate formal encounter demonstrates a visual relationship among the parts, a pattern to the surface treatments and an intention with the overall contours. Through that encounter, I want to stimulate in the viewer the desire to seek the source of a visually evident system.  By not proffering concrete answers about that source, I intend to encourage the viewer to bring to his encounter elements from his own experience and perspective, which will play a significant part in any conclusions he may draw. On a broader scale, this work is intended to call to the viewer’s attention the more mysterious aspects of the human experience, aspects in which we can take a measure of joy without necessarily fully understanding them.

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.

Blackfish Gallery, Portland Oregon

2016

I spend my best time making dishes and vessels and objects for my own house, for my own use or visual stimulus. Pots which aid, enrich and reflect upon my lifestyle, especially the part centered around food: from growing and raising to gathering and harvesting to preserving and cooking to eating and sharing. Some of these objects are specifically utilitarian, the pickling crocks and tea sets, and others, the bottles, offer a visual response to the squash and other full, engorged vegetables I like to grow. Then come the baskets, which occupy a grey area between the useful and the visual. It all culminates into a sense of the nourishment and plenty that comes from raising and gathering and eating food, a sense of the full experience of food.

Since sharing that sense of plenty is as important as partaking in it, I have decided to donate 10% of all the sales from this body of work to good causes. I have donated to Sisters of the Road, Oregon Food Bank, The DAPL Protest effort, the Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief fund, and to the William Temple House.

Blackfish Gallery, Portland Oregon

2018

“A teapot is a machine that makes tea.” - John Neely

“You have to learn when it’s appropriate to sacrifice a little bit of function for the sake of form.” - Dan Hammett

“You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” - CS Lewis

Tea has a lengthy, rich, ubiquitous history, and its gentle presence in today’s world carries a weight and import as subtle and complex as its wide range of flavours. I am no master of tea. I am just another potter with a daily morning ritual of steeping and drinking tea as I wake up, transition from the previous night’s dreams into the reality of the day ahead. I can no more forego this ritual than I can forego the sleep that came before or the activity that comes after. Considering the growing tumult in the world, the drastic news we find ourselves waking up to every morning, my ritual of tea in the morning is my one reliable, comfortable moment of peace and contemplation on any given day. It is my time, my own, to spend alone while I do a well-considered nothing.

In other news, I’m totally turning into my mother.

Blackfish Gallery

June 2021
with guest Careen Stoll

This is a show about drinking.

Alcohol and bread seem to be ubiquitous to humanity. Every culture that could grow some kind of grain figured out how to bread it, and every culture that realized old food could have intoxicating effects figured out how to ferment for imbibing. It’s a staggering range of commonality for humanity: from Appalachian bourbon to Irish whiskey to Italian wine and grappa, to Greek ouzo or Russian vodka, to Japanese sake, Chinese bijou, or Korean soju, to English beer and gin, to Ethiopian mead, Venezuelan rum and Mexican tequila. We’re all human, we all have food that goes bad, and we all drink.

Whether part of sacred rituals, or for medicinal purposes, or for conviviality and celebration, or spilling over into the trials of excess and addiction, spirits have potently manifested themselves as inherent to our cultures.

“Up the bottom” is what a former sculpture professor used to say by way of a toast, instead of “bottoms up.” The baskets filled with shooters are a tribute to a memory of potluck dinners during my grad school years; John Neely has a very large bowl filled with little shooter cups from multiple generations of students and fellow artists. Some of us used to linger at his house well into the wee hours of the morning; he would get out the liqueurs he likes to make and pull down that large bowl. And we would raid that bowl, pulling out all those little cups to explore, each of us trying to find the right one for the evening, the right absent friend to share the moment with.

These bottles and cups hearken to a sense of ritual, not so much high and lofty and religious so much as vessels intended to house one’s spirit of choice and wait for the moment of sharing and imbibing. Each bottle and cup is unique, thanks to the hell they went through in the wood kilns, and I like to think their uniquity compliments that in the people who engage and use them. I’m not picky about what kind of spirit these vessels house - though my personal bias is for bourbon. To be picky would negate my interest in the variety of both spirits and the people whose tastes go this way or that. Whether you fill it with whiskey to share with a friend, or keep it as a bedside water bottle to quench your midnight thirst, the real point is: which one is the right one for you?