These cut-photo collages are created using photographs that I take and print as source material for paintings. The collages disrupt expectations and cause us to consider our role in the changing landscape.

Gouache on archival ink-jet prints, these pieces explore the changing coastline.

I started collecting World News Madonna images after I began reading the daily news online. The often-dramatic lighting in the photography and the focus on the parent and child relationship as a way to share the human aspects of news reminded me of Madonna and Child images from art history. I began experimenting with the photographs and found that when the parents and children were isolated, gilded and framed in this way, the universal similarities were highlighted, and the global tenet of our shared humanity is underscored. Since I began the series, I continue to find and add new images. Increasingly men have joined women as Madonnas in the series and the gilding and decoration have become simpler as I find myself reluctant to do much to alter what are often heart-wrenching images.

Pollution Math is an installation of 10 rice-paper scrolls hung vertically and patterned with 90,000 dots. Each dot represents a plastic water bottle, one of 90,000 consumed in the United States in one minute when the piece was begun in 2017. The material, rice paper and indigo ink are intentionally simple and fragile. The handmade dots vary and the pattern changes as I work, a reflection of the time it takes to create a pattern of 90,000 dots. The wave pattern is a reminder of the massive number of plastic bottles and other plastic items that are polluting the oceans and our responsibility for protecting the health of natural resources.

In January 2022, I began a year-long, weekly series of double self-portraits painted from a ‘selfie’. One painted directly from the digital photo and the other from its mirror image. Each pair is painted in monotone with a ‘black’ that I mixed that week. They are painted in oil on 16”x20” paper and I completed each pair in one 3-4 hour sitting. Once the paintings dried, they were put away, each week beginning a new exploration.