In my ceramics work I express themes of human evolution, rites of passage, and the artifacts of the community, or the contemporary “tribe.” Of special interest to me is the role art plays in healing, especially at a community level. My work has been influenced by visiting first nations’ ritual sites in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

About Tribe of Immortals series, wall-mounted figures:
"Tribe of Immortals" is a series of wall-mounted ceramic figures that depict a range of universal human experiences and emotions. Each figure in the series is a witness to a triumph or a wound, an artifact of a life-changing ritual, or the record of a daily event that is common to all people. The simplified style of each form is inspired by funerary figures of ancient cultures that were placed in the tomb to accompany the soul into the afterlife.

In the post-9/11 world I feels driven to seek out that which connects all people as individuals, despite vast separations in geography or ideology. It is my great desire that the figures evoke in the viewer the basic human emotions we share with our neighbors on the globe, as well as our ancient ancestors. It is my hope that these figures may serve as companions to us as we struggle to look for pathways toward meaning, toward connection, and toward peace.

Stacked illuminated ceramic forms

A shelter is a physical place human beings build to contain and protect our families, or a symbolic place we create to protect our identity, values and ideals. In the Shelter Totems series I attempt to explore (and perhaps blur) the boundaries between the physical and symbolic shelters we construct to protect what we hold dear.

Architectural themes and images of nature express the interplay between our need to manipulate the elements to build elaborate structures and our vulnerability to the natural forces of our ultimate shelter, the Earth.