This series of landscapes plays with the idea of figure and ground.  The land is a female figure, the figure is the ground, the ground/figure is papered with  real estate ads. Both land and figure appear abused.  Making the land property?  Making the figure (women) property?  The skies are the ground, the backdrop to the figure.  the skies are liquid and floating with energy, both water and air.

I began this series with the birth of my daughter and an individual artist grant from Fulton County Arts Council.  It evolved from my series on the homeless and was concerned with issues of making a home and a safe environment for my family.    I have picked up the concerns and they have evolved over the years.  The latest have taken the idea of nesting beyond needs to ideas of collecting and hoarding.

This series concerns the over development of the outskirts of Atlanta.  When I first moved to the northwest corner of Atlanta there were large tracts of heavily wooded and undeveloped land.  Since then most of these areas have been stripped of all trees and vegetation and are covered with new oversized houses. These pieces lament the loss of old growth trees and natural habitat.  The majority of these pieces are small and intimate, like little poems of loss.  

This was the third series to be inspired by the work of Jasper Johns. It began with the idea of sculptures of letters, intending to make them abstract and disconnected to language.  Not being able to divorce letters from words, I switched to the manual alphabet and ended with 26 small pieces or one large piece about language.

"The named is the mother of ten thousand things"  Lao Tsu

This was the second series I did as homage to the work of Jasper Johns.  The ten landscape pieces (0-9) find tragedy in the post-industrial landscape and poetry in the weather report.  Each square piece has a raised, sculptural numeral centered, a "poem" from the weather report and a curved crosshatched land shape.  The crosshatching references both Johns' cross hatching paintings and a draftsman's symbol for ground or earth in a cross sectional drawing.  Lined up in order the pieces have a continuous undulating horizon line and follow the seasons of the year, a reference to Johns' four seasons paintings.

While watching a flag undulating in a breeze, I saw that the shapes were quite like the shapes of an undulating landscape and thought it would be interesting to make three-dimensional flags using papier mache techniques I had worked with in earlier pieces. As homage to Jasper Johns, I decided to use the compositions of his flag paintings for the compositions of this series.  Like Johns, I also used newsprint, however I used it for its content rather than its abstract qualities.  These landscapes offer critque of American culture and politics. 

The early work shown here is where my work first seems to diverge into "landscapes" and "objects."

The landscapes are concerned with environmental issues and were created by invented techniques of model making and papier mache.  They are mostly aeriel views of land forms and often show clashes beween overused and undeveloped land..

The "objects" are mostly box pieces inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell.  The ones shown here are from a series on homeless men. 

In architecture drawing proceeds everything.  I am naturally inclined to approach my art the same way.  Drawings are a way of working out problems in a piece.  And at times the drawings by themselves can be stand alone pieces.

"Art is a verb" a professor of mine once said. The process of making art is equally a part of the art.  These are images of the making of Recumbent Landscape VII.