ABOUT ME / ABOUT MY WORK
I am a lens-based artist based in Boston. I received my MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and, after a long academic career as a professor at Worcester State University, am now focused solely on my artistic practice.
I am a lens-based artist based in Boston. I received my MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and, after a long academic career as a professor at Worcester State University, am now focused solely on my artistic practice.
I use photography, mixed media, and digital montage, often in the form of diptychs, to explore the intersections of memory, trauma, and the body. I am interested in how trauma is lodged in the body, and how historical and contemporary culture, medical practices, and politics create narratives around women’s bodies.
In much of my work I use my own body is both subject and site of inquiry. The images are often obscured, fragmented, or paired, reflecting the emotional logic of dissociation and the nonlinear nature of memory. I incorporate scans of medical records from my own history, text from the collective cultural ether, motifs from the natural world, and images of domestic spaces to ground the work in lived experience. These elements underscore the complexity of how trauma intersects with place, memory, and identity.
Every Woman and Nobody is the overarching title of my work. I began working with these themes in earnest around 1990, prompted by the revelation of familial sexual abuse, and just before entering RISD. My current iteration is an exploration in three parts: Mythos, Memoria, and Medicina with their overlapping and blurring distinctions in both concept and form. I use the latin form for the words myth, memory, and medicine to add veracity to often dismissed and misunderstood subjects.
My work seeks to acknowledge the layered narratives we carry within us. I aim to create images that are haunting, beautiful, intimate, and expansive, and that offer space for viewers to reflect on their own experiences of vulnerability, memory, and survival. While personal, my work is not purely autobiographical. Instead, it speaks to a collective, often-silenced experience that resonates across many lives.
I am a member of the Kingston Gallery in Boston's SOWA district, the Vice President of the Board of the PRC (Photographic Resource Center), and a signature member of NAWA (National Association of Women Artists)