ARTIST STATEMENT

I have always been drawn to things in the process of becoming something else, objects worn by time, creatures that exist between worlds, materials that carry the memory of a previous life. Growing up in rural western New York with very little, I learned to make art from whatever I could find. That early habit of seeing possibility in overlooked and discarded things never left me, and it remains at the core of everything I make.

My practice spans painting, sculpture, textile art, film, fashion, performance, and large-scale installation, not because I am unable to commit to a single discipline, but because no single discipline has ever been large enough to contain what I am trying to do. I approach each body of work on its own terms, letting the work determine what it needs. The through line is not a technique or a medium but a preoccupation: with transformation, with the strangeness that lives at the edge of the familiar, with the creatures and symbols and mythologies that human beings have always used to make sense of a world that resists being fully understood.

Thirty years of living and working in Japan deepened this preoccupation in ways I could not have anticipated. Japanese culture, its folklore, its visual traditions, its animistic understanding of the world as alive and animated, gave me a new language for things I had always felt but struggled to articulate. It also placed me permanently between two worlds, which turns out to be exactly where I work best.

I make art because the world is stranger and more layered than it appears on the surface, and I want the people who encounter my work to feel that strangeness, not as something threatening, but as something to be curious about.