"...a narrow material world unlit by imagination is inadequate to our experience, much less our hopes..."

Adam Gopnik  The New Yorker Magazine, November 2005


My mother sewed, I sew. This tradition, once known as "women's work"  has long grown into the contemporary art studio and is not limited by gender.  "Women's Work"  began with the village women who were responsible for the spinning and weaving of cloth. The church gave women one of their first opportunities to "express" their skills in public by embroidering vestments and altar cloths. For me these domestic skills are deeply ingrained and come out of the home plot.

Domestic process is intrinsic to my life and although the work is not about domesticity it is inherent to the work. I make a home, cook, clean and I sew for a living. This same thread travels into the studio  and is integrated into the whole.


I realize that the designation "soft Sculpture", on its surface, simply describes the difference between hard and soft materials. Could these terms describe masculine and feminine polarities, more or less, which we have been trained to connote? Bronze is more important than fabric? But these terms are passe and narrow as sculpture is just sculpture. I can only work from my woman's perspective.  I use soft materials to make a hard edge,. I give my work skeletons- bones either found or fabricated.The work is padded, stretched and folded. I immerse myself in the materials, the hand of them, hard and soft together. Every detail even the smallest, has import. The source of materials can be important, a glove lost and found again with a hole chewed in it, the locust thorns my brother collected for me and sent from Kansas. Every moment of hesitation is a moment for a new choice/perspective in the process of making. Formal decisions become content.


I am motivated by materials and the pleasure i take in handling them. I am an engineer of sorts, find the right solution for the right materials. A sense of play involves the body of the viewer and relates to the techniques used that show the hand of the maker.


I apply my skills to concepts I contemplate when I approach making a body of work.