About me

The foundations of my practice as an artist and maker were laid at the ballet barre. Hour upon hour, year upon year of perfecting technique, shaping form, creating line, embodying movement. For all of my formative years, art was almost entirely experiential. There was no separation between the process and the product, just as there was no separation between artist and art. For me, the essence of art was, and continues to be, in the doing of it.

The main impetus that drives my work continues to be process. Yet with decades of separation between my formation in dance and my practice as a maker of fiber art, the experiences and materials at the center of my work have changed significantly. During that intervening time period, I lived in almost a dozen different places across the country and across the globe, with each new place broadening my perspective and my aesthetic. In particular, living in Finland and Mexico shaped, among many other things, my sense of time, space, rhythm, color and texture.

I learned to weave as an exchange student at the Pohjois-Karjalan Opisto, a folkschool in Niitylahti, Finland, in 1987. I had gone there to decide what to do with my life after quitting plan A—dance. In Finland, I fell in love with the very physical, rhythmic process of weaving, as well as the culture of textiles and sense of design that permeate Finnish life. Back in the US, however, my attention turned to pursuing an academic career in Latin American literature. Almost twenty years later I finally recognized that weaving really was what I wanted to do, so I left academia behind and enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program in fibers at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. I now work predominantly with interlacement techniques like weaving, knitting and crochet using non-traditional materials such as paper, wire and hand-made felt.