Originally from New York, I lived in Europe, Asia and Africa, and now in Australia, after having worked in 25 countries. I’ve returned fulltime in the last 20 years to my lifelong involvement with painting, begun when I was a child. My international experience has both made me at home in a wide variety of cultures and increased my awareness of pressing environmental issues. My artwork, and my environmental involvement have focused in recent years on forests and oceans.
I've always used a wide range of media: drawing and painting in oil, watercolour, pastel, pencils, aquarelle sticks, ink and acrylics. In about 2022, I introduced paper coloured with acrylic ink and cut into various forms to my paintings. I painted most of the paper I used but included and transformed some images from other sources. I concentrated on forests and oceans specifically as wildlife habitats.
This works in this collection, entitled “Habitats” were based on the perception of similarities between forests and oceans as parallel habitats, comparable in several ways: Forests as habitats were simplified to trees, birds and blue sky. Oceans were simplified to coral, fish and blue water. This resulted in a mixing of the two habitats, with fish in trees and birds everywhere, and a deliberate ambiguity as to whether some images were trees or coral, fish or birds and sky or water.
Statement
My current work (2024) has focused on the idea of tree roots, largely because of our growing perception of how important they are for supporting individual trees of course but also because trees in natural forests communicate via fungi in their roots. And trees in natural forests filter and clean air, start rain formation, hold hillsides in place and act as habitat. My most recent pieces are works on paper, paper-cuttings of elaborate roots entwining.
Together with several members of the Tree Veneration Society, I started and then developed an installation based on tree roots called "Beneath Our Feet." The installation has gone through transformations: first displayed outdoors for a month in an arboretum on the ground betwen several trees, then in a room in a gallery and now as a successful entry in the North Sydney Art Prize to be displayed in one of their underground chambers, tumbling down a rock wall opening in mid-May 2024.
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