origins and ideas

On this page, you will discover more information about the origins of some of the different bodies of work included at this site.  Also included in this section are ideas, observations and reactions from visitors who experienced the installations and artwork in person. Please check the gallery pages for more information. If you are interested in inquiring about any of the work that is on display here, please use the contact page of the site for your questions or observations. 

Seventh Heaven

Three seven eleven thirteen… across cultures there are varying numbers of heavens.

In ancient texts, the Jewish version referred to seventh heaven as the highest heaven,

 the one “where souls are recycled.”

At the same time, I was given a translation of my grandparents’ ketubah (marriage contract)
fromOdessa, Russia, 1901,

where my grandfather promised “to take care of the souls yet to come down to them”.

I saw this place, drew it, and then found texts that supported that vision.

Entrance into Seventh Heaven is not direct or immediate…

there are six tripod gates, made of delicate branches,

with texts that inform the substance of the piece.

STONE OFFERINGS

Stones have been used as markers to guide our way or mark our embodied, yet transient presence on the earth.
These are ancient, hundreds of thousands of years old.

They hold memory and wisdom, and perhaps even souls.

PRAYER FLAGS

Across time and cultures, cloth has been used as a visual signal. Flags, banners, ribbons have myriad meanings – wordless symbols reflecting a belief, a posture, or a message.  Cloth has been used to cover our nakedness, to protect; to separate or to bind.

Prayer Flags are a bridge, a connection, an offering to a Mystery that is greater than we are.  They carry messages, formed and unformed, conscious and unconscious.  They are not our physical, but our emotional laundry, with messages carried/conveyed/expressed by color, shape, and symbol.  They depend upon wind and air to carry  messages skyward.  Legend has it that each thread that falls from a prayer flag is supposed to be a prayer that is answered.

PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER 

One of my most repetitive memories of my mother was of how she put on her stockings. With the same hardworking hands that pulled weeds, crocheted, picked up cow's "gold," checked my head for lice, tied up my long hair in rags to make banana curls, she put on her stockings. With her thumbs on the inside of each stocking she used her fingers to bunch them up so that her bunioned toes would easily slip into the foot, and then while she sat, she slipped the sheer stockings up her leg and above her knee, letting go of the material carefully so as to prevent and runs. With the more tightly woven dark area gently resting on her thigh, she would take a couple of rubber bands, stretch them, put her toes followed by her leg through them, as if jumping through a hoop. She would bring the rubber bands to rest at the top of the stocking, and with quick motions, fold the top edge of the stockings over the rubber band, and roll them down about four inches. Without fancy garters, the left leg was now secure and the right leg ritual would begin. I always thought that it was a most strange and uncomfortable manner of transformation. 
After she passed away, as we were going through her things, we had to make judgments, as everyone does, of what to keep, what to give away, what parts of her were sacred, what was laden with memories. I kept these stockings, and they became the third piece about mother,  
The rubber bands have many layers of associations and I could name some of mine. What is important for me is to have the viewer’s association resonate into something that is meaningful for them. Looking at art is work in that the way the mind/spirit can see/feel things in new ways and make new associations. This is both expansive and integrating -.to have a memory triggered brings new understandings. 
While I have my own reasons for including what I did in each stocking container, each viewer brings her own association to these common objects. It is the juxtapositions of these objects that carry some energy, and make it possible for the viewer to have associations to them. 
Taking the spirit of my mother and filling her stockings with my associations as a way of me reckoning with her, of dealing with her loss, and of working through that which was confusing, troubling, or unfinished, I have come to understand was really an act of love. 
A woman who came to my studio to see the new work said, "That's about my mother too. ." Spirituality is not about being lightheaded, or to be dismissed as “new age”. For me it included making leaps of faith, understanding, discovery; a poignancy, about the balance between what we take for granted and that which is so fragile that in a moment it might be transformed, or lost.

Prayer Tree

an interactive installation where visitors were invited to leave their own messages attached to ropes on a tree, near the prayer tree
on the prayer tree itself, rocks were hung in paint dyed silks
our rocks, our burdens, become our offerings