Many of the pieces in this gallery are recreations of family history, using old family photographs to make up stories of the lives of my ancestors.
The cicada pieces are a combination of my love of line drawing and interest in things that fly.
All of the works in this gallery are hand drawn on linen using thickened procion dyes and or bleach with addition surface design and stitching.
These illustration are done in ink and marker and watercolor on Ampersand Clayboard.
Working with commercial and and dyed fabrics, I like to work with color, texture and shape making imagery that tells a story.
I have worked as an artist in the schools and in the community for over twenty years, both as an Ohio Arts Council resident artist and independently. I have worked with preschoolers, K-12 students through to senior citizens in all the corners of Ohio. The following samples are from some of the schools and community projects in which I have been fortunate to take part.
The pieces here are from a collaborative residency that I did with photographer and artist Patty Mitchell. The pieces made by the high school students were auctioned and sold as fundraisers for both a local dairy farm that had recently experienced a devastating fire and for the local humane society.
At Stevenson Elementary School students eco-dyed fabric using plants that are local to central Ohio as well as edibles from the kitchen. With black beans, sumac, coffee, cabbage and pokeberry, they made dye, applied it to the fabric, cut the triangles for the celebratory bunting and stitched decorative circles onto cut branches as part of the schools “Five Columns Project”, a rotating installation project.
At West Liberty Salem Elementary I worked with theater director and designer Jeff Hooper to create a 16 panel maze that represented Cedar Bog, a local Natural History site. Students researched and created the flora and fauna that are unique to the bog. The walk through installation to the viewer through the bog. Each panel represented a different hour of day, taking the viewer from early morning to late at night.
At the Ohio School for the Blind I worked with elementary and middle school students to make a felted wool panther, their school mascot. We used recycled wool, embroidery thread and button to make a piece that was both visual and tactile.
The two pieces here were made with Portsmouth High School students and hang at the Southern Ohio Medical Center Cancer Center. The students were asked to make something to hang in the family waiting room and chose to use the view from the picture window that looks out across the Ohio River to Kentucky as inspiration. I met with cancer survivors at the center who wrote words of hope that the students incorporated into the wind. The two panels, one of the view in daylight, one at night, hang on the east and west walls, framing the bank of windows that look to the south.
My first residency at Passion Works Studio with Patty Mitchell opened the floodgate of a new passion- working with adults with developmental disabilities and other barriers, The cyanotype quilt and the appliance quilt (based on the drawings of David Dewey) were made during that residency. The painted sculptural pieces were done during a second residency.
