About Me
I am an artist, expressive arts consultant, and the Legal Editor for the Alaska Legislature. I have a B.A. in Literature from the University of Vermont and an M.A. in Expressive Arts Coaching and Consulting from the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. Since moving to Juneau from New England in 2011, I have taken inspiration for my art from the land, water, and wildlife that surround me and the frequent camping, hiking, and kayaking trips I go on with my two lapdogs, Lulabelle and Phoebe. I have been making art since I was a child, over the years working in an array of media, from drawing, painting, and cardmaking to poetry. Most recently, I have become enamored with collage.
In 2016, I traveled to Nepal for an expressive arts consulting practicum. While there, I picked up several pieces of Lokta paper, handmade locally from the bark of the Daphne plant. These remained in a cardboard box labeled “Nepal” in my home for almost four years, until March of 2020, when the pandemic reached Alaska. Around the time I first became aware of the virus, I spent a weekend at a Forest Service cabin on the edge of the Eagle River delta north of Juneau, drawing late into the night with colored pencils I had brought along. Out of one of these drawings surfaced an image that I wanted to recreate on a large canvas. Back home, I pulled out the cardboard box of Lokta and began to cut up shapes to put together to replicate the drawing. While playing around with the paper fragments, a new image began to take form—that of a crane flying into the sun.
In 2017, I was at a conference in Anchorage when I received word of my grandfather’s passing. I left the conference and took a walk in Kincaid Park on a trail above the mudflats and along the dunes. A light rain was falling, with the sun intermittently breaking through the low cloud layer. As I rounded a corner, I heard a loud honking and looked up to see a sandhill crane flying through a rainbow’s arc—an auspicious visage of my grandfather, a World War II pilot who all his life held a deep love of flight, travel, and all things wild. Three years later, he had come back to me, as my memory of this moment resurfaced in my first large collage.
After completing that first “accidental” crane, I decided to make another. As the pandemic months dragged on, I used up all the paper I had brought home from Nepal and replenished my supply from an online source. I started to explore different color schemes and began collaging blue herons, the other large graceful bird I often encounter in my meanderings. Collage became a very soothing pastime during an uncertain time. I found that, even if I didn’t have much creative energy, I felt a strong sense of purpose in cutting out feathers and other shapes to be incorporated into whatever image next arose. The handmade paper, each piece in and of itself a work of art, interacts with my creative mind, acting as my collaborator in this otherwise solitary time. The rich colors, fragile textures, and unique patterns never fail to transport me to a world that stirs my sense of beauty and imagination.