I cannot be anything other than an artist.

I embrace life, I love life, and I see beauty in life.  I want to celebrate life.  I have a need to express all of this.  Yet, my own life has offered many traumatic experiences.  Most of these experiences are corporeal.  My experiences are a part of me- of who I am- and I cannot erase them.  These experiences cause me to reference the body.  In an abusive home, I grew up with an oppositional relationship with the body.  How easy it is,  in my own mind, to explain why I am fascinated with adorning the body, decorating it, embellishing it, and hiding it.  To be able to express all of these emotions in another language- the language of an artist- is truly a gift!

For some experiences, there are no words.  An artist doesn’t need to use words to express  feelings and thoughts.   I look to crafting to give physical being to a thought, or an expression.  I view it as making a beautiful object in objection to a bad experience.  I can adorn my body in effort to make something beautiful that I have not always had a beautiful relationship with.  As for the actual objects, I see them as relationships in and of themselves.  I look to materials and their inherent properties to help express the relationship.  For example, if I am thinking about tension, I look to the rigid properties of the epoxy to interact with the flexible properties of the nylon in such a way that the epoxy is forcing the nylon to  be flexible, as if it had no choice. 

For me, it is important to concentrate on the beauty, and be able to turn any ugly experience around to make it beautiful.   I gravitated towards use of the computer because of the freedom to explore form that Computer Aided Design allows.  I am first and foremost a craft artist.  CAD is simply the medium that most easily enables me to push my explorations of form in an infinite number of directions.   CAD is the medium that gives every thought the possibility to have shape, form, and tangibility.  Further, teaching is the medium that enables one to give many the strength to recognize their own ability.    My desire to teach comes from a need to  return some of the blessings that have been bestowed upon me by leaving a productive and  positive  mark on those with whom I come in contact.  I hope to help others find their ability and strength, to appreciate, to see,  or maybe to discover themselves.  I hope to help another person discover the beauty of finding their own language- their own personal means of communication.   I think everyone can find something to be thankful for in life, or to realize it is all in the interpretation.  

Depending upon how a person  can view a situation- there are no good or bad experiences.  There are simply events, and the lessons learned from them .  Creating objects demands the same amount of  consideration and calculation as does everyday life.

Life is not simply dealt to us…we must remember to give it shape and form.