Welcome to my site. I hope your visit will let you get to know me… an artist, as an educator, an Appalachian farm girl. The integral format I have employed in the site’s design is simple. Each page gives you a glimpse of some part of who I am: “Home” gives you an introduction and allows you to begin to understand how I think and work; “Artist Statement” provide a bit of background regarding the motivation, methods, and media of my art; “School” takes you inside my life as an art educator; “Current Work” includes both images and information about the current direction my art is taking: “Blog” is an online journal in which I converse about all of these and more—it is a glimpse into my life, my mind, my heart, my soul...
All good human work remembers its history.
-Wendell Berry
These are some ongoing themes in my art work. Click any of the following links for more images. You may also go to my Current Work page for more information about any of these images.
history...roots...grounding us to place...to those who were...feeding the soul...strong yet malleable...ties that bind... to those who are...together but unique...seed and fodder...those who come...memories from once...recollected presently...passed fiber to fiber...woven together...seamlessly intertwined...
my place...my people...my work...my life
separate...equal...together
I really cannot remember a time in my life when I began to draw; filling a page with images is one of my earliest childhood memories. Thirteen years after high school, I returned to school to earn my undergraduate degree from Western Carolina University and upon graduation began teaching full time, along with being a wife and mother of two teenagers. I had continued to draw and dabble with oils over the years, but had no formal training at all. Several years later, I returned to WCU and earned credits that allowed me to receive NC K-12 Visual Arts certification. Now, more than a decade has passed and I am currently working toward a graduate degree in Arts Education through East Carolina University. As a result of my studies within both of these two programs, with various artists, and at private institutions, my repertoire of techniques and media expanded, and I began to draw on what I learned from artists of other times and cultures. My art has, however, remained centered around the people who inhabit my life and the place I inhabit.
My work is a process-oriented project centered on images and objects that prompt memories. Images dissolve, coalesce and evolve as they do in the mind’s eye, fading from view only to reappear in other contexts, often blurring the boundaries between present and past, between real and surreal. The processes involved meander from media to media and technique to technique the way the memory wanders from thought to thought. Materials and imagery are often symbolic in nature, connecting to the visual content to the memory/story that prompted it. The pieces themselves are narrative in nature, as are our memories. A real and personal connection exists between the persons and places within these images and the artist.
