B I O G R A P H Y

Originally from the deep South, I have lived in the Southwest for 25 years. Art has been my avocation since childhood. Because of a “desire to be useful”, I have merged two careers, art and teaching young adults. I have shown in galleries in Taos and Santa Fe since 1988: currently I exhibit with Envision Gallery. A member of Taos Artists Organization, I am participating in the annual studio tour, and have a show at the Stables Gallery opening October 31.

Making art as varied in application as the humanities I teach, my university studies were at the University of North Carolina, where I received a Bachelor of Creative Arts in 1975. As a muralist for a small graphic arts company in those early days, I also did batik flags and poster design. Further training in water-media happened in Wisconsin in 1982,along with sales in pastel miniature. Playing around with portraiture as technique led to fascination with the whole “sitting” exchange between artist and subject. This desire to express the unique beauty of human beings gained nourishment during this period; frequent practice in portraiture continues with the Taos Portrait Society today.

In Taos after that, I discovered monotypes and skills developed for 10 years under the tutelage of Gary Cook. Small handmade books were a workshop focus under Sas Colby, and resulted in a deep appreciation for mixed media that continues. The sculptural, ritual phenomenon of altar-making made a huge impact after close personal loss, and became a genre of installation practiced year after year. I have enjoyed collaborative parade puppetry, and have designed art/ecology curriculum for a number of different age groups, working under grants as diverse as NMArts-TANFF (ages 5-10) to Coleman Foundation E-Art (high school).

Painting, portraiture, works on paper, mixed media, altars: these ways of using art media have been honed in the studio and in my classes. Teaching others to think and apply art has incubated my ideas and materials, giving me a chance to experiment and access a modern emergent sensibility that uses everything. The toolbox of skills I have gained allows me to continually open fresh ground, “collaborating” with Nature. I can use her organic artifacts as media; I can record her elemental forces as transition. I can try to understand, or recognize her children.

As regards 3-person exhibition at Stables Gallery, opening Halloween eve 2008:

Some new work arises spontaneously. However, most of this current collection of mixed media pieces is a means of processing a personal loss.

It seems to me that the season of fall in Taos is a suspended pause...an undertone of losing freedom, change, of surrender, of gathering to harvest and also celebration of completion. It starts in mid August, and lasts into the first of November. It’s almost as if the Fall is Taos’ birthday time, or at least, its essential season. It includes San G Day, all these festivals, the equinox, preparation for winter. The Day of the Dead is the edge of something else, something different, unknown, but all these complex flavors are part of its presence. The first altar I ever made was in 1982, when a close death urged the leap from what I knew of as a sculpture concept called “installation” to what I will call a profound social ritual based on Gratitude.

When Susan asked me to take part in this show opening October 31st, it was exactly the perfect timing to share this work.

For the past several years, I have been working on a set of images based on the human skull. They started out as a sideline conversation for my soul when my Mom moved here three years ago. I knew I would be sharing her last years with her...ever practical and independent, she would only have moved here as a nod to taking care of her own business. No matter that she is spry and dynamic and vital still at 85, as well as still caring for her 95 year old companion, she was aware that things would change. I could feel myself well up with a foreshadowing of loss at times – after all, the boundaries between mother and daughter blur easily: her body IS my body. I started the series as a way of placing that sadness outside of my body, so that it wouldn’t influence our remaining time together. As many of us know, the best times spent are those in which time goes away, and we can just be.

Over time a clear and broader context question became the central theme of this series.....what lives beyond the bones? What of a person outlasts the form?