About

I was raised in New York, went to school at Ohio State University for Fine Arts, moved to the West Coast where I lived in San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles, before moving to Raleigh NC, where I currently am an Artist, Museum educator and High School Art Teacher.

In my Abstract Artwork I use nature as my inspiration for forms and configurations. I am fascinated by the way light filters through ocean algae, jellyfish, octopus tentacles, anemones, tree roots, and branches. Music also plays an integral part within my work. I use music to help set a mood through color and composition. These paintings started me thinking about form itself. I pulled some of the configurations out of my paintings and translated them into three dimensional works. I started with white and then added color. I soon reverted back to the white deciding instead to play with light, focusing more on the form aspect of it.

In my sculptural creature work, they started out as organic creatures made from recycled fabrics to give as gifts. They had different personalities that emerged as they were created. Some were shy and demure, while others were bold and fiesty. More people wanted them and I became part of Visual Art Exchange Launch program. Here we learned marketing and branding to put our creations out in full force. It was a crazy year with a lot of cutting and sewing to create these guys. Some transformed into other mediums such as collage and watercolor. After that year though the cute quirky creatures had run its course in me and I moved on to a new idea of soft sculpture. Working full time and then also doing side classes put this on sloooowwww motion. From it though Claudine was born and others are in the works, again slowly, because of other aspects taking priority.

In light of recent events in our society brought out by the politics of this nation, I have started a new body of work that speaks to an area I didn’t address in my artwork in an actual statement. I have been the victim of sexual violence. Members of my family, close friends and students (who have shared their stories through their art) have also been victims to this violence They have given me permission to put them in my art pieces. Too many women are victims of this violence. I was inspired by the “ROAR” that the “#Metoo” movement had and the emotions it stirred up again inside. My assault happened in college. I never told anyone then what happened. I was ashamed and embarrassed. I had to work through my emotions and mistrust of males to be able to have the relationship I wanted to one day have. It took time, healing. Going into nature, sitting and observing, making art, these are the threads that helped stitch me back together again. Having talked with family, friends, and hearing students stories, I see the resilience in the many women this has happened to, but they stand back up, stitch themselves together in their own way, using their own “thread”. These women are inspiring to me in how each of them found their own way to create a new way to move forward.