ARTIST STATEMENT
During the height of the Great Depression my grandmother saved everything, from magazine clippings to greeting cards she received from friends. I’ve been using these keepsakes in my art practice for years, a reminder not only of the ties that bind me to her, but also to our shared identities as women, wives, and mothers. These pieces of so-called ephemera exist in the tension of their transitory and finite nature with their eternal meaning accrued through their union with stories of care and love. Wrapping paper means one thing when it’s on the shelf of a store, but it becomes something else when it has enfolded a gift for someone on their wedding day.
My grandmother’s presence in my work reverberates in other ways as well: as an undergraduate she sent me cassette tapes she’d recorded of her reading the Bible, talking to me about theology, the weather, family get-togethers, or sometimes playing a hymn on the piano. I’m still listening to those tapes today.
I almost always have some kind of music going as I work. Sometimes I’ll put a song on infinite repeat, the Smiths or Thomas Tallis, and start to see and feel the chords and melodies flowing into the visual field of what I create. My husband and I made a band together and now I get to see things move the other way, too, the colors and keepsakes of my history mystically taking shape in the songs we’ve recorded.
At the Cooper Union at night they’d blast music in the shop where we worked, the technicians teaching us as they moved in the rhythm of the songs and machinery. In the morning I remember Color Theory class, Rauschenberg and Albers and the Black Mountain School. I can still hear their music. I like old paths and moving through new doors. I have a way to walk with my Saviour, the divine sprites, fairies, and muses. It’s fun to play again..