My work arises from my passion for the landscape. Living in both the urban and the rural environment, I oscillate between the biomorphic organic world of the country and the geometric grid patterns of the city. All function within systems and cycles of daily routines, seasonal rituals, growth, decay and renewal. I construct environments informed by the landscape.
The dynamic range of my recent work SurfaceStructures comes from a deeper understanding developed through my observations, research and documentation, listening to the media and making landscape studies of places visited from my travels between New York City, the Catskills and across the United States. I have a heightened awareness of the fragile state of our environment through the effects of global warming, natural phenomena, war and urban growth.
The materials that I work with emphasize various emotional and physical states of vulnerability, strength, natural and contrived boundaries as evidenced in the landscape. I begin with a flat rectangular material–paper, canvas and linen– aware that each is embedded with its own place in art history as a window to another world or artist’s soul. These surfaces are then transformed by cutting and folding methods influenced by bookmaking, origami, and other paper construction making techniques. An abstract field is made using limited color, line and negative space. Working with the surface tension and structure of paper, canvas and linen sets up structural and visual challenges that dictate the overall shape, scale and form of each work. They become environments of cascading or freestanding structures embodying real space while sharing emphasis of a built surface through additive and subtractive painting and printmaking techniques.