I have always been compelled by transformation. My early work was a reflection on the psychodramatic narratives of victimhood, an identity informed by neglect, abandonment and thievery. As a young woman in NYC, I was acutely aware of how the male gaze stole my sense of self as an artist. My conversations were mainly with dead women artists: Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca Woodman among them. We saw the materiality of the world as a way to transcend our bondage in the eyes of men, we found our metaphorical paths out through photographic performance and used our bodies to speak our truths. The story of the pain of separation, abandonment and objectification – this was the terrain I traversed in search of identity. I knew I had something to say that had nothing to do with pain, but this was the threshold I had to cross over first. 

I think of my early work as a search for identity, of what was lost, killed or forgotten. This character was acting out her traumas, searching for a remedy, but with no perpetrator to blame, no proof of intense suffering. It was bondage to a closed loop of perception, I wanted to go beyond the body to the thing beyond but I didn’t know how. I knew this body was a portal, but I didn’t have the key.

In 1997 I started a gallery in Brooklyn called Velocity. I showed my contemporaries, women artists whose work I admired and who were overlooked at that time. After some success I decided to focus on my own work and moved to California where I made performative photographs in nature. Then in 2002 I had a spiritual awakening which changed my impetus for making art. For years I had been making photographs from a place of pain, taking pictures myself looking dead in various scenes, and finally that identity ended and a new awareness was born. I began to make art from a place of presence, curiosity, and wonder at the intensity of nature and the expansiveness of the universe I was experiencing.

In 2010 with the birth of my first daughter, I began to paint again. I reconnected to movement, used my whole body to work more fluidly, and integrated my experiential understanding of consciousness into making art and being in flow. I sought out accidents, encouraged chance, and let this inner energy guide me in gesture and material choices. Then in 2019 I left California with my family and returned to New York where I began a new series of digital paintings.

Covid interupted and we headed upstate, where I was confronted with all of my limitations. Faced with a long winter of isolation we moved to Hawaii, and on Maui I began to paint on paper again, reflecting and transmuting the energies of that intense geographic location. Immersed in and repaired by nature, the ocean and the energy of Maui, it felt like I was breaking free of everything I thought was real before. I went inward and connected to a deep reservoir of knowledge, and shifted into a different frequency of being and channeling. The following year on Kauai I painted continuously in hotel rooms as we moved about for many months, and the work felt ethereal and fluid. Thus my work on paper and canvas reflects the multitude of experiences I have had the privilege to know since the pandemic arrived and my family became nomadic. Traveling inside and out, the intention of the work has become clearer – to reveal an inner state of expansion and develop a language that will transport and transform.