Artist Statement

The Artist at the Intersection of Middle Age

I am drawn to the human form and the poetics of everyday action. From my perch at the crossroads of visual and performing art, I look back to blurred, low-lit photographs of mid-century conceptual and collaborative art. The performance document, meant initially to stabilize the transient and ephemeral moment, has now become aestheticized as a new art form in itself. My interest lies here, in the ambiguity between the experiential and the artifact.

My current work draws from over twenty years’ collaboration in contemporary dance, interweaving my sculpture as set, costume and prop. Now, the emphasis shifts to self-contained artifacts with implied performance. I use apparitions of the theater—set and costume—foreground and background—volume and space—as formal devices as well as metaphors for time-based actions. In place of live performance there is evidence of the hand, the hand-made and the sense of touch. These objects are stilled. Textiles play an increasingly large role in the work as surfaces onto which my drawings and photographs are printed.

The artist at the intersection of middle age looks to the past to find her location in the ever-shifting landscape of theory and impulse in art making. What informed my art practice then remains with me now—making an idea “real” through the process of material experimentation and placement in a context, either real or imagined. I see the art object as a stand-in for human experience.

The imagined and the real, mind and material, sacred and profane, sublime and ballast: each serves as place-keeper for the absence of the other.