ABOUT MY WORK

I am the second of four sisters. Four girls, all growing up together under the ever watchful, always loving gaze of my mother and father who never failed to line us up to snap photos and take movies. Dinner at the diningroom table was followed by family time when we gathered in front of a clattering projector that churned each captured sequence into memory or perhaps a charade of memory.

I watch these fading images—now preserved digitally—and see all the successive vacations, holiday gatherings, matching wardrobes and staged antics of dutiful performance until, as our innocence ebbs, I can detect the curious stares of myself and my sisters as we came to see these intrusions as markers meant to place us in time for some future version of ourselves we could only dimly imagine.

And now that I am that unimaginable entity - an adult, an artist - I seek to somehow transfer these familiar pathways of my past into maps and constructions where memory can be more deeply plotted. In this way, tangential moments that were never recorded are recalled while events that were purposely forgotten are reopened like a long detoured highway.

Although the subject matter of my work is a self-portrait, my interest in memory construction reaches beyond the parameter of myself. My work questions choices that I’ve made, the observable patterns that have resulted, and the hidden infrastructures that are revealed. What I hope to distill is not an ultimate truth, but a deeper understanding of the way we accept our own fields of memory by exposing and strengthening the connections we have within ourselves and with each other.

ABOUT ME

Many of the images that chronicled my childhood were taken in Buffalo, NY. But of the many lives I have seemingly lived, I found myself in towns and cities from California to New York, Oklahoma to Iowa, Germany and back to New York, and on to Louisiana. I now find myself in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, a perfectly preserved small town long tied to its namesake university and the town where, not so coincidentally, my father grew up. The house where I now live is cattycorner to the house my grandparents once lived. I recently joined the faculty at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania where I teach digital art and design fundamentals. My past teaching experience includes Southeastern Louisiana University, Purchase College, and Manhattanville College.

I earned my MFA degree in Visual Arts at Purchase College in 2002 after having worked for many years as a freelance designer and digital consultant for CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY. That, too, was a circuitous route. My undergraduate experience was an education in perseverance. I earned a BA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1981 after having earned credit at SUNY Geneseo, the University of Delaware, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. I was also married for ten years to Mike O’Donnell – a poet, teacher, and officer in the US Army – whose life was unexpectedly cut short due to a heart condition.

I have a wide range of life experiences that informs my work and teaching philosophy. Along with a growing exhibition record, I have participated in a number of artist residencies and received numerous grants and awards. A copy of my current artist resume as a .pdf file is available by clicking here.

Thank you for visiting. I continue to search out new approaches to mapping out life events and welcome feedback. Please email me if you have any comments or questions. And return often. I intend to update this site with new work and explorations regularly.