At the crossroads of painting and cultural, personal, and family history, my multi-faceted practice seeks to explore how experiential processes confirm unifying and fragmented links of life. I am always looking ahead while re-inventing how I continue to use materials in my work, and my investigations explore how intersections of technology and traditional media reflect our collective day-to-day life experiences on a visceral level.

Source materials have included an archive of family photographs and documents, as well as images from old books, news footage, popular culture ephemera, nature/life studies, and reproductions of art from through the ages. My process combines disparate genres with figurative and non-figurative patterns and marks, and I sometimes create clustered pieces that join several media including painting, works on paper and embroidery. I feel strong kinship with the Pattern and Decoration and Feminist Art movements. Observational drawing and painting from life has always been essential to my practice. Ancestor worship provided the basis for much of my earlier work and continues. The use of sewing and embroidery enhances my connection to the Eastern European women I’m descended from, all of whom created beautiful things with needle and thread.

Themes/subjects have centered around self, familial, cultural, and national identities, illness and healing, biological systems, food, and the challenges of documentation amidst a rapidly changing technological world. Storytelling and the handing down of tales, sometimes elaborately exaggerated and embroidered, while attempting to define who we are through generations, is at the heart of my work.

My paintings, works on paper and embroideries have been shown in galleries, libraries and museums internationally including Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Los Angeles; POST, Los Angeles; the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Laguna Art Museum, Annika Sundvik Gallery, New York; Apex Gallery of the South Dakota College of Mines, Otis Gallery; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, Maine and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine. A group of embroideries toured libraries of Italy as part of the First International Fiber Art Biennale. I participated in two painting residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada.

After earning a Bachelor of Science with Honors from Western Washington University, I completed a BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, where my painting studio was next door to the Gamelan room. That hypnotic, beautiful steady beat provided germination for the seeds of my artmaking practice. Designing and teaching my own courses, beginning with “Portraiture and the Family: Behind the Snapshot” at Art Center in Pasadena, instilled in me a deep love for teaching and I’ve always considered these duties to be an extension of my studio practice. I currently teach courses in drawing, painting and design at York County Community College in Wells, Maine.