Artist statement

Art-making is a means of expressing my emotions, ideas, hopes, dreams, and values.  Using familiar materials from the home environment and from nature, I explore life passages and the mingling of sacred and mundane with work that brings a strong sense of the hand and which invites the active participation of the viewer and community. As important to me as my studio work, I use the art-making process, including movement and music as well as the visual--with groups to facilitate community-building and healing, both of which have strong roots in the feminine.

The malleability and accessibility of fiber-based materials have been of particular interest.  They can be stitched, dyed, bound, braidedtransformed by a limitless variety of approaches. Cloth and the fibers that compose it are familiar and mundane, yet they speak volumes through their color, texture, and structure.  I have also been drawn to spices, which introduce scent. Smell is supposed to be the most evocative of the senses.  Many of these spices are also seeds, which suggest new life.

 Most recently I have been drawn to the idea of home and what home means.  I returned to Milwaukee, my birthplace and the home of much of my family, about two years ago.  In the exhibit Women of the Book at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2008, I did two site-specific installations, one using the letter Bet (which references home and blessing) and another using long tsitsit, or fringes.  This was in homage to the use of the building as a synagogue for many years and to my family's long affiliation with it.  Many friends here helped to tie the 100 sets of nine-foot-long tsitsit which became a kind of "holy of holies" within the gallery space.  I subsequently photographed several community members in the installation and will show them in the future.

My previous body of work explores intimacy and marriage. My inspiration was the Song of Songs, the highly erotic Biblical love poem in which two lovers express their passionate longing for each other using nature imagery.  I wanted to create an interactive structure which evoked the essence of intimacy and the earthiness of physical union. The huppah (the word comes from the Jewish marriage canopy, although it is not the same structure) is a circle twisted from a grapevine. Attached to it is madder-dyed silk organza.  When the couple steps into it and uses a rope to pull it up, they raise the circle and the fabric to contain themselves in a rosy veiled space and they must continue to hold the rope to keep the structure from dropping.On the floor are the vividly red roots which were used to dye the fabric.

The smaller fabric pieces are heavily embroidered with motifs which recall the imagery of the Song of Songs.  I scanned watercolor studies into a computerized sewing program to generate the images.  Interestingly, the computer created texture in the embroideries where none exists in the paintings.