Update ----

So getting the faculty art exhibition up this week has consumed most of my time, plus we've received nearly 100 entries for the exhibition "Self-Evident: Contemporary American Self-Portraiture", which we are trying to organize even prior to the November 19 postmarked deadline.

This year with the faculty exhibition, we're doing something new - everyone has to turn in an artist statement to be included in the exhibition binder. So this is a welcomed push to get my act together, and re-work mine . . .

ARTIST STATEMENT

My current body of work, consisting of hand-worked embellished textile assemblages, hinge on intersections and the inherent tension, disorientation, and anxiety arising from conceptual and material collisions. The pieces investigate personal and cultural issues that are intentionally difficult: I believe good art comes from friction, micro or macro. The work glistening with embellishment and embedded with treasures beckons the viewer while presenting fractious imagery.

Working with a fine craft medium within a fine art structuring of concept and presentation is itself a subversive act, meant to posit a conflict of aesthetic assumptions. Incorporating personal narrative and popular culture iconography within Catholic inspired compositions, the medium of embellished textiles enables the investigation of polemic or emotionally murky subject matter with a material that can be a decorative foil for the content. My method of hand beading and quilting creates a dimensional surface that is highly tactile and luscious. Thoroughly complex and work-intensive creative processes attract me; the art in the work happens during the creative process, and the process becomes a type of meditative labor of stitching symbols and binding narratives.

Imbued with a Catholic aesthetic, my pieces in composition and content refer to both to the devotional and decorative. They are my personal altars, embedded within a ritualized context. I draw inspiration from objects that embrace artifice and decoration: Haitian prayer banners, Gothic reliquaries, Byzantine mosaics and paintings, Vienna Secession art and architecture. My aim is to create beauty; works that have the capacity to be seductively decorative in form and emotionally disconcerting in content.