From a young age, I was drawn to world religions, which sparked a fascination with archetypes. In my twenties, I delved into archetypal psychology and mythology, exploring how psychological patterns shape our inner and outer lives.
In my thirties, I encountered Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, a model that works with subpersonalities to promote healing. Experiencing its power first-hand led me to train as an IFS trauma therapist. My creative work, whether as a director, performer, or visual artist, naturally weaves together these threads, often centering on the divine feminine and rooted in a deeply personal narrative.
I've always explored similar themes, but over the past eight years, my visual practice has been shaped by the progression of a tremor in my dominant hand due to Parkinson’s. As the condition advances my work has evolved from more figurative to abstract. This gives me freedom to allow for a loss of control in the work.
Statement
Series: When in Light, She learns Her Name
Since the mid-1990s, my work has explored goddess energy as embodied in both the divine feminine and in earthly women, drawing on archetypal psychology and myth. Early projects included alternative-process analog photography, interdisciplinary performance, and mixed-media drawings and paintings. These works often incorporated women woven with maps, celestial symbols, and text from quantum theory papers, as I recorded my attempts to connect with their presences across time and space.
Over time, my practice narrowed to visual art. In 2010, I created an extensive personal archetypal card deck to reflect concepts like Compassion, Fierceness, and Vulnerability. These cards became a catalog, a guidebook, and a well, I return to when beginning a new piece.
Each painting begins with a whisper—the essence or feeling of a goddess I sense emerging. I conjure her presence using colors that evoke natural elements, laying down the terrain of the background in acrylic. I build up layers with ink, water, and more acrylic to create fluid pathways shaped by gravity and chance.
Next, I turn to patterned paper. I cut, tear, fold, twist, or lay it flat, shaping its movement into form. I have a conversation with the paper—sometimes guiding it, sometimes following where it leads. It’s a playful discovery of who had the better idea: the paper or me. Finally, I return to color, integrating the composition with ink, oil pastel, or spray paint.
In recent years, a progressive tremor has changed how I work, inviting deeper collaboration with accident, imperfection, and surrender. My series, When in Light She learns Her name, reflects this dance between control and release—archetypes alive in modern women: fierce, powerful, vulnerable, and whole.
Meteorites: Artist Books
Series: We Met Where the Celestial Body Broke Open
Meteorites are named after the nearest recognizable geographic feature to where they were found. This series of five artist books: "Mediorite" in the spirit of this naming convention are named after cities within a 200-mile radius of Chicago, where I was living at the time of their creation. The series originally had seven works, the five remaining books are: Sylvan Lake, Cassopolis, Loami, Inverness, and Aberdeen.
Each book contains a rock split open, a layered interior made of canvases painted with blue and white acrylic, then a delicate hand-made book with deep blue pages with silver ink, holds a poem. Within these pages unfolds a dialogue between two women—one earthbound, one existing on another plane—the poem illustrates their separation and their simultaneous synthesis, tracing a shared longing for connection and the quiet recognition of an unseen bond.
These works hold the tension between distance and intimacy, rupture and union, offering themselves as vessels for a connection that is both cosmic and deeply human.