For many years I’ve researched, designed and sketched a series of works that has brought me to this place where I’m seeking avenues, skills, mentors and space to execute and bring these images/concepts to life.  This journey of twist and turns, rocky and smooth roads has brought me to USF where I have found the encouragement, community, skills, mentoring that I’ve yearned for.

As an artist I am of the earth; by that I mean a creative mind who uses the earth as a medium of expression. It is fundamental for all of us to understand how those who walked before us on this earth lived, loved, created with this same earth and upon this same earth as occupants and artists, as I and others, as I as a sculptor, hold this same earth in my hands to invent, to inspire, to provide, to utilize, to survive, to live, to create. It is this concept of earth and life’s lessons of the far reaching past that touches, reaches forward to reality in this present. Of similar thinking, feelings as those beings of this earth 60 million years ago; this earth survives to inspire, overwhelm, to launch me as an artist into the future; and of these ancient skills to motivate these earth stained hands of mine back into this clay to create future contemporary visions.

I am a survivor. I believe we learn from the past. I believe our future depends upon learning the paths and lessons of the ancients. I believe that our journey as humans depends upon us as artists to create environments, art and visions that provide us connections past and future, concepts, relations, beauty in the nature of things natural, harmonize with the environment, beauty in the reality of nature’s raw, stripped innocence and ancient wisdom. I believe these relations, these connections when expressed, built, created, become contemporary to our naked eyes as if seen for the first time when taken out of the fuzzy, cute cuddly context of the artificial world we live in. As we can relate to massive landfills of human waste, the stench, the disgust that we accept as real, we force our eyes away from the most natural acts of for example, buzzards feasting upon the entrails of road kill, or the violent act of wolves taking down a deer. We’ve come so far from nature along our path that our roads are coming to an end. Ancient peoples are viewed as ignorant…primitive, but could even one of us, I, my peers survive for more than a week in a hut, hunt for food or create a tool?

With the support of family members: my husband, Rick, and adult son, Ryan, and daughter, Mary Anne, and friends: Nan, Pam and Doris, Chuck and Irineo , I also have the encouragement and resources to pursue new creative ventures. My life has come to this wonderful, exciting stage where I’ve earned the freedom to create and work as an artist full time.