ARTIST STATEMENT

“If you work with your hands, you’re a laborer. If you work with your hands and your mind, you’re a craftsman.
If you work with your hands and your mind and your heart, you’re an artist.”
-Saint Francis Assisi

I begin with a photograph. I print, cut, fold, sew and sculpt the imagery into three-dimensional quilt-like abstract paper sculptures and objects that occupy, shape and define space. My process is slow, repetitive, mindful, meditative. I re-construct, re-envision and re-create. I adjust and transform the scale, affecting one’s proprioception and sense of movement through space, offering the viewer a moment’s pause to feel.

In the process of creating, I have come to understand a critical piece of my internal being: I am the child of a Holocaust survivor. Although it is something I once resisted, I now welcome it as an imperative call to honor and remember, to share stories, to live and to love. In the midst of life’s uncertainties, I seek beauty. I explore the mystery of abstraction and joy of play. I embrace the unseen opportunities in the re-imagining and re-shaping what I capture through my camera’s lens.

When my mother died, I was left with her house and her garden. My work is physically, spiritually, metaphorically rooted in that garden. We are all our mother’s gardens.