My work focuses on the intimacy of the act of expression through the experience of the artist's touch. The perception of all of the materials I use and installations I create are comments of how I understand my own existence and how it could be valued in our culture. In creating spaces and choosing materials I am not asking "why am I here" but rather asking "what is my purpose." I make items that have a relevance for me and how they pertain to man’s and woman’s existence. These things are my symbol system and they have an importance to my own presence and spiritual life.

I often work with staffs and trees as they suggest qualities of being human. Each has its own personality and connection with the earth. Like a wrinkle in our brain creating a memory, an annual passage of time is displayed in a tree's rings. After selecting which staffs I will use, I then interrupt the space. At times, I adorn and embellish the staffs with various costuming and artifacts but more often I feel compelled to allow their natural beauty to simply show by stripping away the bark to expose the wood and let the sun bleach and dry it. In various environments, I have arranged the staffs into community groupings. The viewer often sees the relationships clearly and in a secret childlike manner. The elements of these installations portray adults’ roles while the viewer is cast as a child, seeing everything but not knowing what experiences and memories the adult has had.

In continuation of the wooden staffs, I construct "Tree/Trail Marker Sculptures" with welded steel, sewn fabric and various mixed media. The task of sewing as a girl and the act of welding in the early part of my professional career are skills I desire to use and express even now. Similar to the wooden staffs, the steel materials are chosen for their unique aesthetic qualities and are often mounted to bases or planted into the earth so as to give them a traditional art historic reference. Recently my exploration of materials has turned to the most basic elements of nature as they are made seasonally available to me. I simply go outside and pick up the dirt, the sand, the snow or collect the water. I have been making, accumulating and arranging these hand held ball shaped elements that inevitably evolve into a different state by the forces of nature. The dirt balls grow grass, the sand balls blow away, the snow and ice balls melt into puddles. Placing these balls together emphasizes my desire to understand why I played with these very things as a small child. In contrast to these natural elements I have also been working with the recycled man made metal aluminum. I respond to my desire to cast the molten metal, not for the creation of a statue but more directly for the experience of witnessing the metal’s reaction to other materials and patinas.

Not knowing and the act of discovery is a suspenseful and exciting parody. Learning about the different markings and hidden spaces I have made, the viewer will find references to all of my past experiences and my feelings about the history of other people who were here before us. It is not my desire to tell the viewer what to see, but merely to have them interact with all of these elements and on some level begin to recognize some of their own stories. These works are an evolution of things that reflect my changing attitude both towards historical references and varied materials. We make objects all the time out of materials we label permanent or durable in an attempt to mark time and our place in it. Reflections on varied perceptions of the constant struggles between man and nature, beauty and form stand as reminders of our need to understand our wants and desires.