Port Townsend, Washington
When I was 6 years old, I was allowed to choose the décor for my bedroom. I chose pink ballerina wallpaper, a pink dotted chenille bedspread, pink and white striped café curtains, and a fuzzy pink rug beside my bed. Over the years I gave up pink but held onto design and expanded greatly my fabric choices. My mother and grandmother instilled a love for handmade quilts, though I eventually realized I didn’t have the patience for hand sewing or the repetition of completing a pieced quilt.
I attended university at Montana State in Bozeman, where I studied Fine Arts and gained a BS in Landscape Design. Life unfolded as it does, and I worked at many different jobs including making wooden kaleidoscopes with my first husband, managing a greenhouse, returning to the University after becoming a single parent to work in the Residence Life Department, and then with my second husband, moving to British Columbia, owning a Bed and Breakfast on Salt Spring Island. Throughout those years I dabbled in art when I could and created new landscapes on 8 different properties as well as for several clients and friends.
Upon retirement in 2012, I turned my thoughts and energy to art, joined a couple of fiber groups and fell in love with the many aspects of Fiber Art. While living on Vancouver Island I entered the Sidney Fine Arts Show and won Juror’s and People’s Choice awards each of the three years there. I have also exhibited in galleries in Victoria BC, Port Townsend, Seqium, and Port Angeles, WA, Tillamook, OR, and at D’Art Center, Norfolk, VA. I have been published in Quilting Arts Magazine.
I have found my way as a mixed media artist, using fabric, paper, paint, beads, found and repurposed objects, – whatever suits a project. I have come to enjoy 3 dimensional work and relish the experimentation and challenges in problem solving in that realm. Design exists for me like language or music. Although there may be a finite number of letters or notes, there are seemingly endless ways of combining each to create a new story or cadence, true as well of visual art when working with design elements, techniques and materials. Though I don’t often have a set idea of what I want to create, I look to Nature and am inspired and taken by patterns found on rocks, water, trees, plants of all kinds. Architecture is also interesting to me, from a fence design to a magnificent building or worn and weathered shack, it is forever about pattern, light and color. Sometimes my work tells a story, other times it expresses a mood or emotion, a bit of whimsy. My hope is always that the observer will take time to slow down, pore over the details and find a bit of pleasure, comfort, or inspiration.
