I first showed my work in New York with Simon Gerigo, at his gallery in the East Village in the 1980's. I showed mostly watercolors. Part of my interest in watercolors came from its being a very light and flexible medium. One of the visual influences that had great impact on my work was early American quilts, esp. early Amish patterns. From incorporating visual elements into my watercolors, I actually began to collect cheap, raggedy quilts from flea markets and began to re-assemble, repair and re-stitch them so that they would become not only functional but beautiful again. My repair is not archival, but functional and artistic at the same time. A big part of working on these projects is the dialog that ensues with each individual quilt, assessing the best route to take so that each piece will be strong enough to be used again and will also be spiritually and visually in touch with the impulse and character of the original quilt maker. In this way I've come to see these quilts I repair as a kind of "site specific" genre all of their own . Somewhere along the way I also became very attracted to that most light and flexible art form of paper cutting. Some of the very early quilts I worked on were actually pieced from designs in which hand made paper cut-outs were used as the templates, or stencils, in which shape the small pieces of fabric were cut-out, flowers, snowflakes, even tracing and cutting out the hand prints of each member of a family to put into a quilt pattern. In the 90's I've been showing with independent curators , Alfredo Martinez and Chris Kelley, and in a way I realize they have all been , whether stated as blatantly as this show which sets a strict criteria of format and display, 9 4site specific". "Site specific" in just dealing with the individual characters on the scene of each show, and in terms of making something specifically for each show. In his recent RAGNORAK show, Alfredo Martinez asked me to create a really large work for the space he h
