ARTIST STATEMENT

My writing and photography practice is a contemporary inquiry into landscape, sense of place, memory, narrative, meaning, and healing. I am committed to art that unearths truths, offers healing, and creates social change. I work with writing and photography to give voice to unspoken stories in the interest of personal healing and social change.

I am fascinated by the relationship between photographs and language…the ways in which a photograph can elicit memories; the ways in which photographs inspire language or silence; the ways in which language inspires the creation of a photograph.

My photography is influenced by the theory of Carl Jung and Minor White and the concepts of synchronicity and the collective unconscious. My writing is influenced by the work of Carole Maso, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Judith Barrington, and Patricia Hampl. I write and make photographs because doing so sustains me. I am deeply moved by the ways in which longing and desire inspire language and art. Both my writing and photography originate from a place of expressing authentic voice, and I strive to inspire others to become intimate with their own authentic voices as writers and artists.

My current work includes a fine art book, Where Language Fails, a complex weaving of photographs and text that probes deeply into the interstices of memory, land and place and explores the equivalence between fragments of narrative text and evocative landscape photographs. This work is based on a memoir in progress that investigates fragments of memory. Both of these works explore complicated issues of the mother daughter relationship, longing, addiction, loss, suicide, and death and reveal hidden truths in shards of memory. These impressions are echoed in the still life images of Inherited Objects.