Art projects

 Projects and exhibitions

2022     Thinking in Systems - What’s Next for Earth - Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) -  A Stanford University Initiative - Group Show

Material Evolutions 1 - Dimensions: 6"H x 6"W x 2”D Description: Mixed media collage -  Repurposed costume jewelry and fabric on stretched canvas.

In the biological world, the edges of ecosystems, where one system meets another is called an ecotone. It’s the place where all the “action” happens. The activity at the boundaries (and their various states of permeability) are where the inputs, outputs, and feedback all occur. Edges, walls, borders and fences all present varied possibilities. This series explores these demarcations utilizing the "DNA" of well-loved jewelry and clothing to build new interactions.

Material Evolutions Series- ongoing

2021     The Collapse - What’s Next for Earth - Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) - A Stanford University Initiative - Group Show

Meditations: Emergence ( A series of 6) - Dimensions: 6"H x 6"W x 2”D Description: Mixed media collage - Pine cones, seed pods, stone, branch, seashell, and hand-rolled paper beads on a wire structure on a cradled wood gessoed panel.

This series is about resilience. It is about the place at the edge, an ecotone, the area that may fail or evolve to survive when met with new variables.

In this exploration, I am considering “botanical” formations and the "evolutionary" trajectory they take when encountering unexpected interactions.

In this case, they are meeting with social unrest, a global viral spread, and the Spring season. What emerges?

2020     The Arts are > Greater Than - Cultural Alliance of Western Connecticut - Group Show

Well-Behaved When Balanced: A Supplication - Dimensions: 36”W x 48” H, Description: Painting - Acrylic on canvas.

Inspired by our world. When the rainforests are on fire, the air is smoggy, the ground is toxic, the water is polluted, and the disconnect between man and his environment is palpable, I am reminded of powerful forces and the sense of awe they produce.

My response is to make a narrative painting to give thanks and to implore revealing the interconnected state we all share.

Declaring Human and Sacred Vitality

An artist always functions as a conduit or catalyst who ushers in new possibility to take on a life of its own.  As a creator, the artist inherently bears the burden of painstakingly conveying raw potential into something uniquely realized--just as a parent nurtures a child to become his or her own person.  I continuously explore the relations between individual perceptions of reality and the reality of possibility. I engage in my work to remind myself and others of these links between layers of reality--and of the role our active stewardship of such connections plays in the formation of a sacred space.

Verdant Vistas: Finding the richness

A series of six landscapes exploring nature as both a multi-elemental compilation and jewel.

2006     Artists in our midst - Clare Gallery, Hartford, CT -  - Group show

2019     Open Studios Hartford - Arbor Art Center - Group Show

Verdant Vistas #2 - Dimensions: 8” W x 10” H, Description: Mixed media collage - Glass, seed pods, feathers, and paper on card stock.

Verdant Vistas #3 - Dimensions: 4.5” W x 6.5” H, Description: Mixed media collage - Glass, seed pods, feathers, seashells, and paper on card stock.

Artist Statement

I currently am exploring the landscape as “messenger” or that which is in a constant state of “reminding us” of our inherent connection to person, place or concept. The “elemental” ingredients that we all share are readily available in our everyday lives in many forms, such as, plants, stones, feathers, or glass. These and many other ingredients are imbued with historical, scientific, mythical or religious significance. I am looking at these components, as they are always part of the interwoven tapestry of “landscape”, to reveal their story.

You are only as far as you feel

A series of fifteen assemblages (seed pods, feathers, dried flowers, rocks, shells, wood, plant parts) on paper and silk.

2000     ArtSpace Hartford, CT - Group show

Artist statement

The work I find useful always somehow integrates deep tranquility and frank biological energies. By useful I mean simply that which, beyond theory, makes an undeniable, tangible impact on my own or others’ experience. There is no formula here so much as existential integrity: to be fully embodied in this charged and sentient universe means unblinkingly re-uniting cold scientific law with the hot prophetic imagination.

I began my journey with this current series of works (“Mother Goddess Muse”) on a day when my daughter Tasya, then about four years old, and I decided to take a walk at a nearby forest. Her truly vivid experience of the outdoors reminded me of why I enjoy walks. She picked up leaves, and flowers, and looked to find a way to hold on to them. A flower press was the first means by which we started to preserve them. Tasya did not want to press them, because they would then be flat and not true to their state in nature.

In the woods and elsewhere we would also sometimes find feathers, pea pods, shells, small bones and other records of varied plant and animal lives.

So at the most immediate level, my present work is a journal representing the botanical life that we encountered together on our walks. But more archetypally, the inherent personality of each leaf, blade of grass or other item began to resonate with the purpose and larger whole that formed our daily experience.

The process by which shaping this work has for me revealed the layers of aesthetic possibility also affirms the specific function of the artist as an unstoppable explorer. Linking the natural world with its correlates in autobiography allows art to be a force which can drive all of our futures – individually and collectively.

The work as a living process steadily reminds me that our innate connectedness with the world and cosmos around us manifests elegance and grace. By anthropomorphizing the world’s inherent rich order and beauty, I aim to make more recognizable and human such grace and dignity along with the semi-representational figures.

Additionally, such a primacy of biological elements in both art-making and finished work can make available to us the reality that all life forms, including our own, are components of a larger organism: specifically, our first mother, the earth.

Commercial forces sentimentalize and trivialize such realities as “Mother Earth,” “Father Time” and related archetypes. Artistically declaring the centrality of these realities can therefore reinvigorate and heal our increasingly co-opted and de-sacralized world.

1993-1998

Exploration into the cosmogony of various traditions and the “traditional” role of mother figures.   A continuous series of mixed media work utilizing an identification badge format.

1992

A series of twenty small works on paper depicting designs found in native regalia.

Landscape

1991

A series of eight small commissioned works utilizing paint, sand and crystals as part of an investigation on the concepts of “radiance’ and coastal dichotomy.

1990-1991

A series of fifteen paintings utilizing three dimensional "underpaintings" and the human form as a map for “organic” objects in narration.

 CT Herbal Institute

1991 University of Connecticut, West Hartford campus- Solo show

1990 Behind this ripening - Bard College 

Artist Statement