How I work

I am a self-taught artist and have been making art off and on for the last 15 years. I develop my ideas by making many variations of what ever I’m working on. The work I did over the course of two years with the Ladies is a good example. I started doing monoprints in 2003 with a vague idea of making skirts, which evolved into making collage figures with paper bag heads that I placed on the monoprints. I worked exclusively with found household papers such as sugar and flour bags, candy and pasta wrappers, torn scraps of wrapping paper, onion bags, and other trash, to create fantastic outfits complete with accessories. I started writing short vignettes and dialogues for backgrounds, and decorated the ladies with hair and faces. By the time I finished with the series in the fall of 2005, I was still writing dialogues illustrated with ladies, but I was also experimenting with contrasts in scale between the foreground and background images.

This particular series was shaped by my fascination with fashion, style and clothing, which I see as tools of cultural assimilation and social camouflage in a world infused with inequitable distributions of power. I’m intensely interested in the contradictions between the outer persona of an individual and their inner experience in small intimate settings. I’ve been haunted with Robert Trivers’ view of evolution: that our survival depends on our capacity for self-deception, not to deny reality, but to avoid detection by an attacking enemy.