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Artist's Statement
My work is often about transformation. Using objects created for other ends in my art, so that their reinvention becomes, as it were, subtext to the broader themes my works address. For example, I often use garments–especially bustiers, bras, girdles, kitchen aprons, children's clothing and gloves–as both means and vehicles of containment. Inside their stiffened, shaped, embellished husks-transformed by resin, glue, instinct and paint–I embed unique books and objects reflecting each works gloss on personal, feminine, societal or spiritual issues.

Alongside the girdles, other garment books also have taken shape. I began to use baby clothing because their scale is workable for books, but their significance immediately became apparent. They became receptacles for my memories of childhood: idealized vs. painful. These pieces explore issues of childhood and motherhood. My own feelings about my infertility live in work created out of toddler dresses and baby rompers. Gloves and hand-shaped drying forms comprise another body of work that explores the hand as a most basic sign of human communication- a greeting, a warning, surrender and embrace are all communicated through hand gestures.

In 2001, I began to create environments for these narrative sculptures. Using varied modes of display, the installations are inspired from the dioramas in natural history museums, retablos and altars, drawing on a narrative tradition in which the impossible is probable in which magic and marvels coexist with things actual and proven.

By interpreting ideas and themes of identity and alienation, echoing the fragility of our roles in an ever changing world, explored by the Brothers Grimm and other essential folk-tellers like Charles Perrault, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, Peter and Iona Opie, and Italo Calvino, whose stories are both accessible and revealing, I strive to put all these issues in context, to create new worlds and new homes for stories I collect.

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