Me, myself and I

I came to printmaking circuitously, while I was teaching weaving at a fine arts camp in Connecticut, which I was teaching because left-handed people have a hard time becoming glassblowers, which I had been interested in studying because I had gotten tired of the trumpet, which I had started playing because the flute was lame and had too many keys and made me dizzy, which I chose to play in the 4th grade band because, well, girls played the flute or the clarinet, and flute was obviously way cooler...

But that was just a summer... Then, in Rome, I was supposed to be writing a novel. And when, low and behold, writer's block hit me, I turned to printmaking once again, thanks to a one Ms. Diane Hanson. Printmaking appealed to me as a writer because I could constantly revise my images. What once to me had seemed like an art of reproduction became an art of production. Printmaking 'loosened' me up and changed my relationship to words. They became beautiful, powerful objects, and there was something mesmerizing in physically bringing them into existence with my carving tools.

But that was just a year... Then, in SF, as a dutiful grad student, I desperately needed an outlet...A way to put to use all the backwards doodles I made in the notebooks of my margins, a way to add color to all the words I heard and read and repeated and quoted and highlighted and photocopied and interlibrary-loaned and presented and and and...And so I found the printmaking studio of a one Ms. Katie Gilmartin.

Printmaking appeals to me for two contradictory reasons: it both helps me escape from the rigors, the pressures, the obsessions of my daily life and at the same time somehow feeds from them. Thus, my work both contains fantastical, playful, humorous elements -- the circus, a carousel, paper dolls -- while situating them within serious contexts -- heartbreak, Dante's Divine Comedy, a Hemingway short story.

My love of words and language is prominent in my prints. I translate, mistranslate, rewrite quotes of authors that have haunted me from childhood as I dialogue with them in lines and colors. With all these elements, I strive to tell quiet stories, stories that linger.