Statement and PROCESS

I create new and imagined staged scenes that integrate and juxtapose realism with illusion, villains with saints, longing with disconnection. Born of intuition, mood, and inspiration, my constructed images are suspended in vibrant fantasies that hint at ambiguities, yet always a slash of light offers a measure of hope.

Constructing these images brings light to those shadows and ambiguities: they expand on the noir tradition of looking at what lies beneath the illusory, sunny narrative of American life and ‘domestic tranquility’. I envision each scene as a still-frame in a film that exposes the fragility, longing, and missed connections hidden by social convention and myths. It is these elusive and liminal moments that most intrigue me.

My image-making begins with an idea that is not fully formed, but is informed by my years as a psychiatric social worker, political activist, graphic designer, traveler, compulsive doodler, and mother of two inquisitive daughters.

I combine and manipulate, paint and alter, fuse photographs with painting, reality with fiction – whatever it takes to tell the story. Each image is carefully constructed digitally over many weeks, compositing and assembling models (mostly non-professional), costumes, figures, objects, and settings, as if creating a stage set. Shadows and light, often digitally constructed, become major characters in the image. I think of each image as a still in a noir movie frame, that elusive and liminal moment between moments. 

I shoot in various locations around the world - landscapes, architecture, animals both alive and dead, and of course people.  I move, alter and transpose photographic content to interpret and transform images grounded in internal experience with those of concrete reality. I let the process and my intuition take over as I repaint, add and subtract. I use color, chiaroscuro, texture and harmony as characters within the composition. To prepare for an exhibition and after multiple test prints and revisions, I collaborate with a Master Printer to produce limited editions using archival pigment inks on the finest papers.

 I have long been drawn to and inspired by artists and art forms that evoke solitude, mystery, or self-reflection through color, chiaroscuro, and geometry. My image-making is heavily indebted to: the geometry, patterns and abstractions of the mid-century American painter Edward Hopper, whose solitary figures seem absorbed in their interior lives, and whose work I often reimagine; to the 17th-century Golden Age and later painters such as Jacub Schikaneder who used light and shadow to evoke emotion; to the eerie staged film-like constructions of Gregory Crewdson; and to the foreboding sparseness, slashes of light, alienated protagonists, and stylization of contemporary noir cinematography.

I make my home in New England, where history and light inspire my art-making each day.