As an artist, I am both a collector and a researcher - a hunter/gatherer of material 
and a seeker of knowledge and understanding.  

While I have lived and worked in New York City for many years, most of my early life 
was spent close to nature. Growing up in a small town in northern Idaho in the foothills 
of the Rocky Mountains, my father and mother had complementary influences on my 
relationsihp to nature. My father was a mining engineer and geologist. For him, nature 
was to be mined and the goal was one of “beneficiation,” a mining term meaning the 
extraction of the essence of the rock, separating the valuable mineral from the rest. 
My mother was a landscape painter, who found the crucial element of nature to be its 
beauty, and our relationship to nature to be one of connectedness. For her, “truth 
and beauty” lay not only in nature, but in the human heart and the human spirit.

My collections began with mineral specimens from my father, and stones which my 
mother and I collected on the beaches near the lake where we spent our summers. 
I was a “material girl” and still am.  I take great pleasure in collecting and sorting, 
making groups which differentiate the texture, color, “presence” of natural objects. 
While I began as a painter,  the tactile aspect of  making collage, assemblage and 
sculpture - moving, sorting, combining, physically manipulating material with my hands 
is not only consoling, it is a joy for me.  

Over the years, I have collected bits of nature and culture, which carry with them their 
own history: stones which have been washed by the melting snows; abandoned shelters 
in the form of shells; antique books which have been written, read and reread by people 
unknown to me; old wood with generations’ of applied paint, which are like pentimentos 
of others’ lives. In my current series, Matters of the Heart, I use a diversity of gathered 
objects, including biomedical materials which were collected as part of my research about 
the heart. I combine materials, weave my presence into them and in this process, something 
new emerges. The work becomes an interface between such apparent opposites as matter 
and spirit, the finite and the infinite, the past and the present, nature and the human-made, 
the universal and the personal.