I’ve been a watcher of shadows and light, carrying a camera around my neck since childhood. A collector of all forms of detritus, stowing rocks, fallen nests, and dried pods in boxes and on windowsills. The image drew me in, nature wrapped its nets around me, wax melted my heart. But first, always, there was poetry and story.
The persistence of narrative, holes in the story, and the natural world inspire me to explore the intersecting spaces between image and text. Using encaustic and cold wax medium, oils, photographs, cloth, thread, paper, salt, rust, and found objects, I work to cover and reveal in order to amplify narrative tension and locate the story within. By adding layers and gouging, scraping, and incising, I store and explore memory, loss, grief, joy, the effects of time on culture, and lost spaces surrounding language. Regardless of the medium, I seek to inform interpretations of events historical and ahistorical in my responses, by talking back.
In addition to making art and writing poetry and fiction, I am a teacher of the blind and visually impaired, editor, partner, and mother. A founding member of the Jewish Artists Collective of Chicago, I have exhibited work at the Woman Made Gallery, Spertus Institute of Jewish Learning, The Evanston Art Center, The Art Center of Highland Park, The Bridgeport Arts Center, and Morpho Gallery. A three time Illinois Arts Council Award recipient for writing, I have published poetry, fiction, and essays in Intellectual Refuge, Best American Poetry 2013, Lilith, Zocalo Public Square, Brain, Child, Jewish Fiction, and in other publications.