"Eve's Code" and "Pandora's 21st century boxes" bodies of work

My inspiration comes from the experience of being a mother. I have been fascinated with the scientific discoveries on the DNA chain as well as revolutionary contemporary debates on human evolution. In my creative journey I research the questions of our beginning and our existing, emphasizing the important and absolutely unique role of women that in my view are the most sophisticated software of all.

National and cultural identities are an essential part of every individual. As a mother and an artist, I am responsible to attempt to celebrate and appreciate the differences. All of us are unique in our own way but that also, all of us are the same, a human being.

I feel that the contemporary world is in an imbalance between nature and industrial technology and so I use clay as one of the most archival natural materials to carry modern, hi-tech visual elements. Combining the two I create a harmony in the art piece that would metaphysically relate to the issue of finding a harmony in today's world.

Platters:

As a ceramicist and printmaker, I find the surface of the platter as most exciting to experiment and manipulate. The platter surface evolves into my journal’s page. Layers of glaze colors, drawings, photo images and typography translate into a story that echoes my personal interactions with the time and world around.

The four brooches have a figural and narrative element; three of them incorporating a stylized female figure.“Scrolling,” “Siesta,” and “Captive” are from a series, in which the dominant figure is shown in relief, restrained, sometimes breaking forth, sometimes revealing forms or objects within. Each brooch is an episode: pensive or joyful, celebratory or nostalgic. Some reveal my love of ornament; in others I seek, beyond the content, a sensuous cohesion of form, color and surface.

The necklace “Melt,” references the crisis of global warming. The other two, Necklaces #7 and #8, are my most recent pieces, reflecting a new direction. The narrative qualities of the former pieces are gone. The brooches hang on the body as a two-dimensional work would hang on a gallery wall, but the necklaces adorn the body, draping or dangling with its movement.

The earlier work was about telling, these two works are about being. I am still anguished about the state of the environment and other matters, but these concerns are balanced by a celebration of nature and beauty. I have an intense attachment to color, which is an important element in my work. It has been introduced with the reactive metals, with found objects, with the colors of metals themselves, enameling or patination. My latest focus has been to create intense, sculptural color and plentiful form.

My work is about being somewhere and paying attention. In a world that is increasingly mediated by technology and language, the act of consciously taking time to experience an actual, concrete place in the world would seem almost an act of rebellion. I enjoy, and have learned to trust the tension that a specific place, a specific time, a specific set of complex conditions of light and space confer upon the process of painting. My aim is to capture, not the subject per se, but the energy of the struggle to see and respond to the visual complexity of the subject. In this way, even the false starts, and the many inevitable adjustments and revisions become necessary, meaningful and beautiful.

Over the years, while traveling in the Four Corners region of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona and looking intently at the landscape, I have been well aware of modern man’s impact on the natural beauty of the West. Over a decade ago I renewed my interest of an older occupation of the land by various groups of people living in the Four Corners region. The 700- to 2000-year-old roads, moki steps, cliff dwellings, pueblos, kivas, kiln sites, dance sites, towers, pithouses, granaries, cultivation fields, and rock art sites are all evident for those who explore.  For the past ten years I have been exploring not only the rock art, ceremonial, living, and storage sites but have also investigated their trail routes, farming, and resource locations and have worked toward an understanding of the interrelationships between these locations and their use in the context of the environment.

This work is part of a bigger response to experiencing the sites first hand, reading archeological surveys, site reports and studies about the area, finding historical artifacts and signatures left by early explorers and archaeologists, and discussions with scholars, friends, and modern Pueblo Indians. I have visited most of the sites numerous times at different times of the year and annually find many new ones. I owe a dept of gratitude to those few folks, close friends, who participate and endure many of these adventures.

These particular pieces are each about specific aspects of prehistoric sites located in the backcountry of southeast Utah and the experience of finding and spending time at each site and its setting.

I make my images by taking my camera with me on "visual scavenger hunts." Unlike the scavenger hunts of my youth which began with a list of items to be sought out in a prescribed period of time, those I engage in now start without knowing exactly what I'm looking for and occur without concern for time. I depend on my subject to reveal itself to me during the hunt. And once discovered, it's my intent to record what I've found in a way that is both insightful and personally satisfying.

The images themselves are typically of common things seen in an uncommon way. I take particular satisfaction in finding my subject matter among those things that are normally overlooked by passersby due to their presumed insignificance. Rather than wanting to show a particular subject in its whole form, I'm more interested in moving 'in close' to exclude from the picture frame everything except that which I consider to be absolutely essential to convey the true essence of the subject. In this respect I embrace Mies van der Rohe's dictum that "less is more."

At a point when photographic technology permits, if not encourages, the production of complex imagery on a larger and larger scale, I take more satisfaction in creating carefully crafted images on a more intimate scale. Rather than forcing the viewer to back away to see the entire image, I prefer the viewer to be drawn in and encouraged to see details otherwise unnoticed.

Research:

My research primarily concerns the art of Anglo-Saxon England and Ireland in the early medieval period. My work raises questions of meaning in context, of the range of audiences of early medieval art and the associations that different groups of viewers and users brought to the structures and objects that survive from this era. I am interested in differences of viewpoint, both literal and metaphoric, between ecclesiastics and laity, men and women, the literate minorities of church and court and the larger agrarian population. I apply this approach to works across several media: ecclesiastical architecture, manuscript illumination, metalwork and sculpture.

My long-term project over the past decade has been on drinking horns and their social contexts in the early medieval British Isles. I am interested in the role of these vessels in feasting practices and in hospitality as a first stage in an escalating cycle of reciprocity that was thought ideally to bind together different levels of a vertically structured elite with ties of mutual loyalty and obligation. The project also entails a catalog of the extant metalwork horn fittings from the British Isles in the period from the Roman to the Normans; the horns themselves rarely survive as the keratin of which natural horn is constituted is fugitive in most archaeological contexts. This project will be published as a book, currently in the writing stage, to be entitled Drinking Horns and Social Discourse in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland; 500-1100. Research on this project, as well as others referenced in my list of recent publications, has been generously supported by Ohio Wesleyan University under the aegis of the Thomas E. Wenzlau Presidential Discretionary Fund.

Recent Publications:

Coeditor (with Éamonn Ó Carragáin, University College Cork),: Roma Felix — Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome, Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West,
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008). Includes my article,"Gendered Spaces: The Placement
of Imagery in Santa Maria Maggiore,"pp. 97-111.

"In Hoc Signo: The Cross on Secular Objects and the Process of Conversion," Cross and
Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies in Honour of George Hardin Brown, ed. Sarah
Larratt Keefer, Karen L. Jolly, and Catherine E. Karkov, (Morgantown, West Virginia
University Press, 2008), pp. 79-117.

"Converting the Insular Landscape: Crosses and Their Audiences;" Text, Image,
Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts, (Turnhout, Brepols, 2007), pp. 407-29.

"Remembering Jerusalem: Architecture and Meaning in Insular Canon Table Arcades,"
Making and Meaning: 5th International Conference of Insular Art, Trinity College Dublin,
August 25-28th 2005. ed. Rachel Moss, (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 242-56.

"High Style and Borrowed Finery: The Strood Mount, the Long Wittenham Stoup, and the
Boss Hall Brooch as Complex Responses to Continental Visual Culture," Conversion
and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Catherine Karkov and Nicholas Howe
(Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University, 2006), pp. 31-58.

Co-author (with Adam Daubney)"Lenton Keisby and Osgodby" Medieval Archaeology 50
(2006), p. 287.

"Interdisciplinarity and Medieval Studies: Method, Academic Discipline, or Illusion? A
Response to Christopher Currie" AVISTA Forum Journal, (13.2, 2003), pp. 28-31.

"Romanitas and Realpolitik in Cogitosus's Description of the Church of St. Brigit, Kildare,"
The Cross Goes North; Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300, ed.
Martin Carver (Woodbridge, Boydell for York Medieval Press, 2003), pp. 153-70.

"A Feast to the Lord: Drinking Horns, the Church and the Liturgy," Objects, Images and the
Lord: Art in the Service of the Liturgy; Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers V, ed.
Colum Hourihane,(Department of Art History and Archaeology, Princeton
University / Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 231-56.

Forthcoming:

"The Doors of His Face: Early Hellmouth Iconography in Ireland," Aedificia Nova: Studies in
Honor of Rosemary Cramp, ed. Catherine Karkov and Helen Damico, (Kalamazoo,
Medieval Institute Press, Western Michigan University, 2008) pp. 176-97.

"Reading the Franks Casket: Contexts and Audiences," (Inter)Texts: Studies in Early Insular Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach, ed. Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University, 2008) pp. 143-61.

I knew from an early age that I wanted to work physically ( hands on ) with materials. Sculpture is a field that incorporates a vast range of materials and processes, old and new technologies. What could be more perfect ! My life’s journey is one of unbounded adventure and discovery. In my work I investigate various themes of the human condition with a sense of humor and empathy in an attempt to expose the true nature of our shared experience.

Art in General’ and Aesthetic Judgment, paper delivered at the Art Critical Practices Forum, OSU Department of Art.

L-Beams/Kosuth/Haacke? or Die/Smithson/Levine?, series of public debates titled “Knocking Heads”, OSU Department of Art.

On Performance Art, paper delivered at the The Annual Ohio Area Student Symposium.

Think first, then design.

I am interested in how to jump and move information around in a space--the real world and the virtual world--using nontraditional methods and yet retaining a structure to follow the message’s logic. I feel this adds an individualistic influence, that if authentic, actually helps promote more readability while losing little in legibility.

Sometimes words are pictures and pictures are words; sometimes breaking information down into smaller units (word clusters) is the right thing; sometimes creating rivers of disparate information in the same space allows an interplay with the viewer.

I redefine myself as a visual editor: with the constantly changing methods of producing information and the equally changing methods of delivery of that information.