ARTIST STATEMENT: In all that I do, I rejoice in being an open door, and in giving form to “the wind that blows through me.”    Rumi

I live in the liminal space between sound and vision, and see myself as a conduit for exchange and transformation.  I open the door between my senses, and observe the patterns that move through.  My art is a translation of music and emotion, from the sonic and the conceptual into the visual and the tactile.

As a synesthete, I naturally see sound in shapes and colors. Synesthesia is a neurological trait where the stimuli to one part of the brain also triggers those of other senses in a consistent but unique manner.  Inspirations for my art come from electronic music where the timbre and the image don’t change and can be drawn, as well as the patterns I see in archetypal experiences such as awareness of aging, attachment to place, or emotions such as elation or exasperation.

As I bring together disparate senses like sight and sound into singular, coalescing forms, I also find myself compressing time and space in my patterns and compositions.  I take experiences that occur in time and through time – such as music, aging, or the repetition of seasons – and transform them into the static media of drawing and textiles.  Similarly, my  interpretations of the world do not hang, isolated, in space, but rather involve motion and relative positions.  In my work, I flatten these relationships but leave behind traces of depth, tension, expansion, and spin, enlivened by contrasting colors and textures.  I collapse the time and space of my subjects into planar elements representing paused moments (e.g.: Du Hast, and Do I Want it Badly Enough?) or gathered patterns (e.g.: Xylvanya, and At My Age, Every Time I Look the Moon is Full) that can be opened up again, restarted, upon contemplation.

Hand drawings begin every project, but textiles are my most interactive medium. The tactility, structure, and sheen of the fabric and thread form an integral part of how I engage with the creative process, with the touch of rough and smooth textures, the brightness of silks, the matte of linens, and the sparkle of metallic threads  delight all my other senses.  I have always drawn and loved brightly colored geometric and biomorphic shapes.  My first encounters with the  Modern and Contemporary Art in the 1950’s  at MOMA and the Philadelphia Art Museum gave me permission to further explore drawing in this way. Over time, I taught myself techniques for working with fabric and thread, and in the last few years, I have merged my drawings with my passions for textiles, abstraction, and, most significantly, music.  My recent art created in fabric is the result of this process of translation and transformation.