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Artist’s Statement
Whether moved by the terror of life or the beauty of life, one is summoned to respond. This is my fundamental understanding of love and it is what lures me to create, whatever the medium. Poetry has been my ground. At 16 a poem by W.B.Yeats rocked my world. I had been a non-participating student. Yeats’ words so penetrated me that they shifted my sense of who I was as well as what language could be. The apprehension of an appointment with poetry lay dormant until mid-life and the dissolution of a marriage prompted me to undertake a study of poetics under poets Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima and others -- an experience that radicalized my being. For me, a poem had always begun in the studio of my journal; its genesis arising as much from the movement and play of the hand as from the movement of the mind. In 2011 I developed full-blown Essential Tremor, a genetic neurological disorder that reveals itself in tremors of the hand, specifically when engaged in intentional small motor task such as writing. Another radical shift! Largely in response, I returned to my first love—working with clay. Through early training at Chouniard Art Institute, and more profoundly, through a life-long mentorship and friendship with potter, poet, and educator, M.C. Richards, I found a parallel path to that of writing -- embodying a similar aesthetic. Painting and drawing have been my constant companions expressing what falls between the timbres and cadences of language, and the star-born earth of clay – the play of line and color. |
