Artist's Statement

I am most interested in exploring material that feels elusive – that continues to baffle me. Manual work – handwork, creating what I call artifacts – allows me to work with the parts of my own writing I don’t yet understand, opening doorways to an awareness richer and more surprising than I’d suspected. What mystifies me in my work often turns out to be a threshold to “the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.” The body – storehouse of memories – is a door, a threshold, through which we enter more deeply into the logic of our intuition and associative leaps. Manual work helps to unearth the intuitive logic already at work in the material.  

I like the idea of the poem as a record of an experience – specifically, an experience of the field. Of what happens when one arrives in the field and encounters the aporia – Greek for impasse, difficulty of passing, lack of resources, puzzlement. The white space. Silence. What is the visual equivalent of silence – invisibility? Or stillness.  

We think with and through the body. To walk through the field of a poem is to re-enact, or at least to participate in, the original thinking process of the writer. To walk through the field of one’s own poem is to think – to make available more of the world, shepherding into our own experience that which had been previously invisible and inaudible.  

It is not too much of a leap, I think, to go from the field to the blank page, where there is nothing until it becomes, through the work of the writer or book artist, inhabited with text and maybe images. It is where thinking has happened, and what is left there for us to experience is the record of a movement of mind (and of body) -- intact, recorded, and potential. Traceable.