ABOUT

Originally from Rochester, NY, I’m a fiber artist who received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and printmaking from the University of Michigan. I’ve spent the majority of my professional career in academia as a higher education administrator and faculty member at Syracuse University. In 1998, I joined SU as a faculty member in Fiber Arts/Material Studies. In 2008, I was named Dean of Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and returned to faculty in 2016.

I believe in art. I believe in its contribution to culture by affecting people in deep, sticky ways. I find beauty in ordinary motifs that express intensity and caring. I work exclusively in textiles, which embody the history of the home, and domestic space. Textiles have an intimacy with our bodies and how we experience the world. My materials are made from nature, transformed by my hands into pieces that possess a particular substance and physicality that is critical to me. These have been foundational constructs on which I have built my work.

My practice over the previous years has been about aging and empathy—living at an intersection where my present life met with caring for my aging mother who was ravaged by dementia, where all roads spiraled through the past and back again. Interior Landscapes is a new body of work in which I am returning to the use of nature and landscape imagery, focusing on trees, as an expression of interior “spaces”—states of mind. These dreamlike landscapes challenge the viewer to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscape, and the consequences of loss of both people and the environment.