Painted bronze and wood, 2008, 14” x 21” x 32". For three months in third grade I was the most popular girl in my class. My dad had returned from a big city business trip with Barbie dolls, the first in our small town. All the girls wanted to play with my doll. It was thrilling to be in the in group, but after Christmas everyone had dolls of their own and I was relieved to disengage from the Barbie Fan Club. I tried to see what they liked so much about her, but her caricature figure confined to a lifetime in high heels seemed silly to me. The drive to fit in begins at birth. In America it fuels our economy. Parents strive to provide their children the latest clothes and toys, the right schools and neighborhoods. Children quickly learn what is in and what is not. They hang upside down on monkey bars trying to stretch, diet, or spend hours perfecting their cosmetic masks. Everyone is confused and hurt when parents scrimp and save for the latest fad only to be met with wails of anguish when it is the wrong brand; or a birthday party invitation is suddenly revoked or refused by parental directive because the invitation was from or to a child not in the acceptable social class. But I was lucky; I was given a Barbie doll. After the initial infatuation dissipated I began to feel the exhaustion, the boredom of trying to fit in where there was no fit. Slowly I learned for myself who I was, my passions and dislikes. I learned to live within my own skin. I learned that life was never dull, never stagnate, if I was willing to share my life with people and ideas that I didn’t always agree with.

Growing Up and Finding Sculpture

Growing up in the Colorado Rockies, I always had a thinking place – a rock perched on a hill from which my worries and traumas shrunk in comparison to the world below. When I grew up and left the mountains to live by the ocean, sculpture became my thinking place. I make art to understand me, my time, my place. It is where I learn to live within my own skin.

I have been making sculpture, with stops and restarts, for over fifty years. Transforming ideas into form is just as intriguing and challenging as it was when I made my first piece. In each of my pieces I try to reduce and crystallize complex feelings and multiple experiences into one precise image. I live a simple, small-town life. I coax and pry subject matter and inspiration from everyday life and events. Some pieces are years in the making, others evolve quickly.

My Process

I became a sculptor in the first place to say things I could not say with words. I have always kept notebooks of potential titles, interesting quotes, miscellaneous ideas. But over time, I began grappling to find the image and the words. Writing became an integral part of my work process. Mulling over a concept visually and verbally helps move me past the blind spots, detours, and dead ends. I no longer start making a piece until I have contemplated why it needs to be made and what I am trying to learn; until I have a working title and a half-page draft piece statement. I continue to write throughout my process. I now try to hone and complete a sculpture and its statement with the same care and clarity.

For me, sculpture comes in waves of intensity, followed by down time to recoup and catch up with daily life. It is a journey. In the beginning, I stall by fussing and puttering over the words, because I know that once I start applying wax to armatures, the trip will consume me. My world will become crowded with traveling companions – emerging pieces with no respect for privacy. They will interrupt plans and conversations; invade dreams; vie for attention; model poses and whisper suggestions. They will insist our journey is not over until I have learned all their lessons.

Creating my sculptures requires juxtaposing experiences and memories in search of their truths and contradictions until an idea coalesces to manipulate, prune, and tease into an image. If I am successful, this process of discovery will work in reverse – my work will trigger ideas and memories for viewers from which they can elicit their own truths and meaning. What a sculpture means and the lessons it teaches viewers will be different from those that lead me to make it.

My Sculpture

2022 – 2025

Painted bronze and wood, 2020, 12” x 10” x 22”. On August 20, 2018, Greta Thunberg decided not to attend school until the Swedish general election on September 9th. Sweden was experiencing its hottest summer in 262 years. She was demanding that Sweden reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement. Thunberg sat outside the Swedish Parliament every day for three weeks with a sign Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the climate). After the elections, Thunberg continued to strike on Fridays. In September, 2019, Thunberg addressed the UN General Assembly and an estimated six million protesters took to the streets all over the world. Her speech began with: “This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.” I feel the shame of her rebuke. My generation has failed to grasp and address climate change. I fear for my grandchildren. I fear for our world.

2017 – 2020

Painted wood, last revision 2004, 29" x 20" x 31". My son was born February 14, 1985, on my parents’ anniversary. From the first time my son furiously crawled across the room, looked back with gleeful eyes and a giggle, turned, and crawled just as furiously back, we were teaching each other the gift of letting go. My heart grew resilient from the exercise of constricting with apprehension over the departures and bursting with relief when either of our sons returned. My first gift was an extraordinary pair of parents. I had no choice in the matter, but how I parent is a choice, a gift I give, choosing the quality and size of the gift moment by moment. I have always thought it odd that unlike the word “parent,” the word “child” is only a noun, never a verb. Yet, how I “child,” how I give in return also became a choice as I grew to adulthood. I have been asked if I ever mourn the sculptures that never were because the space, time, money and solitude to create them rarely came together during my parenting years. I don’t. The gift of parenting was far greater than what I gave away. It forced me out of seclusion and into life. It demanded that I become a better person. It deepened my artistic well.

2004–2010

Bronze, wood, raffia and thread. last revision 1990, 16" x 10" x 17". I tinkered with this piece through several showings before boxing up all my bronzes and turning my attention to drawing. After my son started kindergarten, I pulled the boxes off the shelf. It was an amazing period of clarity. I made my peace with the way I made sculpture and, one by one, began to rediscover, reclaim each figure, each sculpture. The years of storage in an unheated shed had taken its toll on In Between. The raffia was in tatters, and in the places where it had broken or slumped, patina stripes could be seen, cris-crossing the figure, echoing the original taunt bindings. I kept putting off a planned re-wrap and then I understood. Change is inevitable. Families, jobs and living arrangements continually evolve. Sometimes I readily shuck the confines of the old, eager to explore the new. But some transitions are hard, forced, painful. Going back is not an option; going forward seems impossible. I am trapped in a backwater, an in between, by my pride, my fear of starting over, my refusal to trade in old hopes and dreams. In Between went into storage tightly bound; it came out marked by the experience, but its bindings were falling away, disintegrating. In Between isn’t a moment in time, it is a process. It takes time to grieve losses, to accept and welcome new possibilities. It takes time for wounds to scab over, heal and scar. But eventually I am ready - to sail on, to chart a new course, to learn a new way of being.

1990 – 2003

Painted bronze and madrona branches, last revision 1982, 13" x 13" x 28". This figure was originally part of a piece named Shaman. But I knew nothing of shamans. In 1980, I moved to the Oregon coast. It was beautiful. It would some day become the place where I took root. But at first it was where I had to be, where my husband's work - commercial fishing, demanded that I be. Yet I longed for the mountains, for the rhythm of the seasons and the glorious crescendos of spring and fall. I longed for the familiar.

1978 – 1989