2022

Acrylic on Canvas

101 x 58 inches

The painting Spring 2020 is made of layers of acrylic wash as I tried to purge the haunting nature of motherhood’s trials, failures and pauses in the Covid - 19 pandemic.

While meditating on the nature of coil pots, building them up, pausing to let the clay harden and strengthen before you continue to avoid collapse. It clearly appeared to me as a metaphor for my current experience as parent in the pandemic.

Mothers (and people) we are constantly asked to take on more, without taking a pause or time to strengthen or support our foundation. We often break and buckle under the weight of the constant influx of responsibilities and challenges. Even when barely balanced we are forced to take on more, while holding up so much. The reverberation of that collapse (subtle or devastating) radiates through our spirit, homes, families, community and globe.

I began building pots with this rymthm in mind. Without the pause. And let the piece buckle organically under their own weight. Each pot, it’s own story of strength and breaking.

At which point they are fired. Vitrafied. Given new strength and new fragility. Each one is a story memorialized. A warning. A call for help.

For a time the only way to make work was with a child siting on my lap. An obvious obstruction and barrier to making the pieces I thought I needed make. And in turn be the person I thought I was. In trying to process who I was now as mother and an artist, I started drawing quick literal self portraits. And then surrender them willingly to my child who would make them a new. It was a collaborations as well a reinvention. A image of my old self, layered, laying under (?) my child’s self expression. Becoming it’s own image in its own right.

2009, Nowa Soda, Kraków Poland

Concrete, Steel

2007 Franconia Sculpture Park, Franconia MN

Concrete, Steel, Paint, Faux Fur

10 x 4 x 4 feet

2007

Green Mountain Girls at North Main Gallery, Salem NY

FGR-95, Spray Foam, Cheese Cloth, Resin

A journey through the colors and color patterns of Vietnam during a visit in 2007

2006

Plaster, Latex

Cheese Cloth, FGR-95

2007

Pottery Plaster, Foam

9 x 3 x 5 feet