When I was born in 1950, my parents had just moved from a farm life and into the city of Newnan, Georgia. Their change from farmers to factory workers created an environment for me that was a curious mix of urban and rural influences.
From 1968-1973, I attended the University of Georgia graduating with a BFA in Crafts. There in the ceramic studios, I realized that to be an artist was to be both mentally and physically engaged. I learned that I liked the work. I was intrigued with the idea of utility or function. How objects are designed for general use, what materials and techniques are involved, and how use of these objects had influenced our culture.
I worked for years before I felt, when I opened the kiln that, yes, this is what I have been working towards. The series of earthenware containers was developed in 1976, at that time, my studio was at The Neighborhood Art Center in Atlanta.
These new pots were angular and tight-architectural. The glazes, soft airy pastel colors, and the patterns were painted in a loose flat style to emphasis the geometric boxes. Pattern and container were prime words for me.
In 1978, I moved to Nexus Contemporary Art Center, set up my studio and worked there for almost ten years. At both of these art centers, I had access to an amazing assortment of visual artists, actors, musicians, writers, architects and dancers. The vitality of that kind of environment was a great influence on my work. I opened up to many new ways of seeing, thinking, and working. I made hundreds of the earthenware containers, mosaic baskets and glass houses, repeating forms and varying colors and patterns. I began to make drawings and these enabled me to perceive different ways of working with glazes. The drawings took me in a new direction as did my growing interest in the history of architecture and landscape. I developed a perverse love of mass-produced building materials.
This interest in materials and structures led me to build my first site-specific sculpture. I chose chainlink because of its industrial pattern, its historic use to mark off territory and because it is transparent. Visually the forms had the linear quality of a drawing yet physically they could be entered. The structures were a different version of inside/outside and the idea of containment.
The larger chainlink site-sculptures, houses and courtyards, slowly reduced down to the idea of chair. Where we sit determines our view. A new series of drawings and sculptures centered on that idea, using hardware cloth, wood, glass and tile. This chair series started in Atlanta and continued when I moved to New York in 1988. In New York, I was living in an extremely urban environment. Rows of trees on the streets in New York took on a sculptural quality for me. I was struck with the use of nature as decoration. At the same time, more information on genetic engineering of food and on the cloning of animals and humans had surfaced. Scientists became the new architects and were working with basic material of life, DNA. What did it mean to be an artist, to make sculptures when they were creating new life?
In 1995, I began to build trees, bushes, weeds, replicas of nature, out of wire, steel, and paper in order to understand the structure of plants. The new drawings were of pine cones and leaves, then vascular bundles, and the cellular structure of plants and animals. The idea of the web of life sparked new site- specific sculptures which I built with the most common of materials, clear packing tape. The shiny, transparent sculptures evoke images of both nature and technology. These mosaics were created with balls of tape and offer a crude version of Indra's net, a landscape in which all things are interconnected.
I live and work in Asheville, North Carolina.
I have exhibited my artwork both nationally and internationally,in over 20 solo exhibitions and have been included in over 50 group shows. My work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the High Museum, Atlanta,Georgi; MOCA, Atlanta, Georgia; the Mint Museum and the Asheville Museum in North Carolina; the Speed Museum in Kentucky; as well as significant corporate and private collections. The American Craft Magazine, American Ceramics, Art Papers, and Art Forum have featured my work. I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and was chosen to be an artist in residence by the Ministry of Culture, Paris, France; the Kohler Arts Industry Studio Program, Kohler, Wisconsin and the American Cultural Center, Damascus, Aleppo, Syria.