Born in New York Metropolis in 1955, I’ve spent a lot of my life mining whimsical, stunning and infrequently controversial topics. As an artist, creator and musician, I’ve been traversing the worlds of each spirit and mundane. As a visible artist utilizing sequins, beads and located objects I attempt to fill empty house with stunning expressions of those two worlds.
I am keen on supplies, enjoying with them, making them work onerous and displaying me how far I can push earlier than they push again. Constructing with coloration, sample, type, and substrates, all whereas communing with non secular energies and entities, maintain me looking by means of my creative celestial backyard!
I began in music. I solely wished to do ‘actual’ music – rootsy, soulful and elemental. I wished to get to the core of what music is, in the best way it lifts the spirit from the within. Music took me on the highway.
I went ‘off highway’ to seek for the ‘yard reveals’ completed by artists who would by no means consider themselves as ‘Artists’. The artwork was a lot part of them that they only couldn’t include it. They WERE artwork, they usually had been in all places; in roadside shrines commemorating a beloved one’s passing, in hand painted indicators that warned of our final vacation spot as Hell if we didn’t comply with the principles, within the singular imaginative and prescient of a girl who is aware of tips on how to make a pie that’ll make you weep.
Then I began utilizing my arms as an alternative of my voice. Visible artwork gave me a extra solitary option to discover tips on how to encompass myself in bodily magnificence and that means. Trial and Error was my alma mater. I performed with all types of supplies whereas creating shrines huge and small. I ‘did’ automobiles (embellishing 9 over time), cremation urns, taxidermy animal kinds, and so on.
For the final 24 years I’ve traveled to Haiti yearly to review and work with artists and non secular mentors. A lot of the artwork work I used to be doing earlier to my introduction to Haiti’s arts and tradition had a unprecedented hyperlink to this difficult place. As soon as I made my first journey, I used to be overwhelmed with what I discovered. So many ideas about bodily house, one’s non secular ‘house’, how one ‘will get by’, what one should danger in the course of the artistic course of, and what IS the artistic course of shifted.
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