Neurologists have determined that the old brain holds the seat of our most primal understandings of the world. Goodwill, security, fear, anxiety, self-protection, gravity, sexuality, and compulsive behaviors generate from this lower cerebral core.

My sculpture and drawings inhabit a non-verbal place resonant with such primal human conditions. Systemic and non-representational, these works are subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. I find beauty and disturbance through shifts in tool, layering and material to create passages of tone, density, speed, path and frequency within a system. In recent room-sized installations, I discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that excites me as the work spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work references physiological systems – such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium - and psychological states.

I’ve come to understand my work as a kind of self-portraiture. Within the quiet reserve and formal abstraction is a strong impulse to speak from a deep place within myself about that which is private, vulnerable, fragile, and perceptive to the human condition. My work is a mirror of how I experience the world and as I negotiate physicality, optics and ideas through drawing languages, my voice withholds, blurs, teases and veils.

I frequently return to subtle distinctions between drawing as noun and verb as a long held focus in my studio practice. This blurred distinction drives my fascination with an expanded definition of drawing languages and the resurgence of drawing in contemporary art. My collective body of work is an iteration of this language.

My work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Drawing Center, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sheldon Memorial Art Museum, Belger Art Center, The Writer’s Place, Macalester College, North Carolina State University, as well as venues in New Zealand, Quebec and Japan. My work is held in museum and corporate collections including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Sprint Corporation, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Niwako Kimono Company in Nagoya, Japan, American Century Investments, H&R Block, and Mitsubishi Corporation, in addition to numerous private collections. My newest work has been included in exhibitions at Cynthia Reeves Gallery, The Drawing Center in NYC, Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN, and H2O: Film on Water and Fabrications projects in New Hampshire.

I am currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, group exhibitions at the Tegnerforbundet in Oslo, Norway, America:Now and Here in Kansas City, SESC Bom Retrio in Sao Paulo, and SoFA Gallery at Indiana University, and a GSA Art-in-Architecture commission for the Richard Bolling Federal Buidling.

I am recipient of awards and honors including a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, two ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grants, a Lighton Interntional Artists Exchange grant (Norway 2011), the Art Omi International Artists Residency, an American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. I was Visiting Artist-in-Residence/Head of Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and taught for nine years at the Kansas City Art Institute. I hold a Master’s of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Miami University.