This very personal series began as a way of my processing all that I was learning and experiencing when I began conducting my Empty & Meaningless: the Box Project workshops in the prisons. A number of the works were my own processing of personal traumas from my formative years (from 5 to 21). Many of the pieces I have included are inspired by the stories and experiences of those people I was privileged to spend time with in those workshops. These incarcerated people allowed me to lead them in a conversations using visual and written art to explore their viewpoints - what those were, how they formed, how they could create them anew. It was a profoundly healing and cathartic time of my career.

I think they may still be doing this in Portland, and the world - a challenging presentation competition called Ignite Portland. I was able to participate in the second year of the event. I did it for a couple of reasons: 1) to directly address my overwhelming experience of Stage Fright; and 2) to talk frankly and openly about the impact personal violence had in my life, and how art and the arts community helped transform my life. You can see the presentation by clicking on the video below the image of the first slide.

This is actually a series that is ongoing in my explorations, and may be ongoing for the remainder of my days. There are so many interesting expressions of human spirituality - I suppose this is my attempt to find the sameness between them all such that I have a truer understanding of my Self, and our Selves.

There was a time when I was not only learning how to be a working artist, I also took on being an advocate for artists as well as a businsess educator to artists and inventor communities in the Portland OR area. This lead to me having very little time in my studio to produce my "proper" fine art as I was often in waiting rooms, waiting to meet with politicians, developers, community leaders and the like. To help me continue the practice of being artist in these seemingly wasted bits of time (the meetings scheduled often began very late), I began taking a manga or ink sketching pad with me and a set of thin tipped markers. Whilst I waited for the very important and busy person in the lobby I would doodle. I kept on doodling in this way for years, and am now again picking up the practice - not because I am waiting, rather because I am done waiting and I really enjoy the look of the drawings...

A selection of book covers, and section covers I created for clients. If you are interested in my designing covers, illustrations, etc. for your publication please reach out via eMail at [email protected]

Once upon a time, in a particularly robust part of my early career, I went to England to learn from artists in multiple genres who worked with incarcerated persons for a variety of intentions - healing, self expression, growth, career development for future following their release, and more. These are some of the images I captured in my travels between Winchester and London, with some points in between, using a pocket-sized digital camera. The quality of the images was compromised, so the resulting pictures were both teased out and enhanced using a new tool called Photoshop. (circa mid 1990's).

There is an ongoing project in NYC called the Sketchbook Project. The idea was to fill a small sketchbook with creative "stuff" related to a single theme. This one, of course, was all about Learning Spells...

These are pieces I have kept in my personal collection. They are shared here for your viewing pleasure... :}

Promotional & Game Posters for an original game titled "Revenge of the Beer Sith." The game creators included the artist and her partner, Mark van der Pol for a client. All the posters for the game were created in collaboration by the artist with ChatGPT's DALL-E, and refined in Photoshop, combining other design elements and photos of the Players taken by the artist's Samsung Note10. All images © 2024-25 Conundrum House Experiences, All Rights Reserved.