A woman of many hats.

with my eyes

Photography is capturing things that you see. With any luck you have a camera and tripod handy when you see something interesting. Encapsulating the multiple facets of natural light is a passion. Also playing with artificial light can make for some memorable images, as well setting up fire experiments to photograph.
I enjoy exploring the photographic processes, and there are many!

with my hands

Building pinhole cameras captivated me. Simply putting a hole in a otherwise light tight box and placing light sensitive paper or film in that box becomes a camera. Then creating images without a camera (photograms) really grabbed hold of me. Hand rolling platinum, palladium, cyanotype or argyrotype chemistry onto art papers and to make photograms is a delightful creative experience. Painting on them with watercolors adds another level of fun.

I often combine photographs of sculpted clay with2/D images I have taken into digital collages.
I love letting clay speak through my hands, often surprising me! Clay is therapy.
I enjoy mixing ceramic with other mediums such as wood, leather, bamboo and steel.
I think of the creations I weld, to display these photograms as "wall jewelry".

with technology

I find the computer saves a great deal of time in bringing my ideas to life. I use to hand cut masks and set up multiple color enlargers with different filter packs along with various black and white negatives, to make double exposures. This was before Photoshop was on the scene. Then I honed my skills creating digital collages. Also the endless possibilities of painting color into an image as well as taking it out. Many of my creations have paneled walls, wrapped vans, buses, boats and trains.

Art Hotel 916
Fracking Destroys Water installation
Jade Hotel bathroom, room 204

Fracking Destroys Water (Jade Hotel apt 2040)
Water is the planet's lifeblood. We are of water and it maintains us. It has always been a creative inspiration for its beauty and power. I get so much pleasure observing its mesmerizing ebb and flow, as well as its explosive torrents or powerful waves. To plunge face first into its soothing depths is a delight! I share some of my photographs of water here printed on aluminum.
Even though the world agrees on the preciousness of water we let huge corporations get gigantic subsidies from our tax dollars to destroy our water. Those corporations put our water supply at great risk of contamination. Fracking is just one of the ways Big Oil is destroying the environment. Hydraulic fracturing wells inject toxic chemicals deep into the earth to extract natural gas or oil out of shale rock producing billions of gallons of toxic wastewater. Fracking continues in California, despite drought conditions.

At the Art HoteI 916, I filled a bathtub with names of just some of the 1,084 fracking chemicals: methanol, ethylene glycol, and propargyl alcohol, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. I drew a map on a shower curtain to show the many existing wells in the USA. Each well represented by a red dot, yellow represented shale basins proposed for future drilling. I am outraged by the oil industry's fracking. I invited visitors to educate themselves by sending them home with a sticker stating “Fracking destroys water” with a web address. New York has banned Fracking. Hopefully California will follow suit. But nothing happens unless the people express their views. Vote with your spending,

Water the Next Battle

Guess How Many Chemicals it Takes to Frack Gas

Consumerism Fallout installation
Jade Hotel, entryway room 204

In memory of Gerber Dump aka E&B Salvage

Pile O Wheels

This installation was a homage to B&E Salvage, known affectionately as Gerber Dump by Sacramento Artists and Makers. Artists loved to explore the yards for sculpture materials and just for the fun of it. Where else could a person experience a 30 foot pile of street lamps! I covered the entryway to apartment 204 with segregated “stuff” hanging from the walls and ceiling in the way of the Gerber Dump sorting practices. Then I displayed photographs I took throughout the 80’s of the place. The dump is long gone but the memories live on. I wanted to share these images and remind us all how important recycling is and even more so, creatively repurposing.
I also wanted to call attention to Western Culture’s rampant consumption of goods. Unfortunately the addiction has spread through the developing world and may soon make the planet inhabitable for the human race.