My 25-year practice is committed to amplifying the historically marginalized female voice within the arts by challenging the Western canon through awareness. The complex narratives women have faced, particularly within the contexts of motherhood, partnerships and family are the core of my practice. Through biographically based figurative work in cast glass, I explore the implications of concessions and sacrifice in order to understand the artists' experience in a human way.
My subjects include a diverse array of women—artists, writers, partners of prominent figures, curators and collectors—who have significantly advanced contemporary art. My research involves photographs, drawings, letters, artifacts, and interviews, the ephemera that captures lives, personal details as a the connection to the work. The trail of an artist's life informs the depth and meaning of their vision, offering critical insights to the poetic problem I perceive. My work poses questions that resonate with my own personal inquiries. As a mother of two and in a long marriage with someone with whom I share a studio, I filter my experience through the historic lens of others' experiences. Delving into the personal and socio-economic patterns of struggle withing both the creative and practical issues I use imagery to tell the story.
My storytelling approach, coupled with nuanced inference, uses spare sculpted and painted imagery in the spirit of haiku, a form that focuses on a moment, a sudden illumination juxtaposed against another. The three-dimensional glass objects that I encase in the solid clear glass becomes puppet-like in the way they appear to move subtly with the optics of the thick glass. I use a pattern of coloured glass frit on the back of the pieces, much like a textile, to give texture and depth.
The formal parallels within all my work, my glass, poetry and painting, are in dedication to constraint as a form. Much like casting, my poetry follows form, and my paintings adhere to a set of rules of my own. I find constraint gives me conceptual freedom by working as an armature for ideas. By pairing poetry and oil painting with the thematic elements, I distil the sensual and emotional dimensions of these individual narratives in service of bringing greater awareness to women's art and to divine the universal experiences of women in the arts.
“Telling stories is what cultures do to understand the history and identities of the people. Through the small details in my work open up a conversation about personal experiences of women in the arts as interpreted through history.”