Artist's Statement

My work is principally collage and assemblage. I like to find things that have been broken, lost, or cast aside and give them new lives by reconfiguring, recombining, and repurposing them. I aim to purchase as little as possible. I scavenge, beachcomb (and parkcomb, housecomb…), barter, and swap with an eye to what I can rescue and transform. When I do purchase materials, I favor flea markets, tag sales, thrift stores, and what my father liked to call “junk shops.”

My pieces incorporate buttons, broken watches and jewelry parts, old game pieces, springs, small hardware, shells, keys, and ribbon and fabric scraps, among other things. I am grateful to friends who pass along interesting bits. I seem to have accumulated a strange assortment of items as I have moved through life. I try to listen to what they want to become next. Art, I think, is always in some sense reappearance.

While I have made my way in the world primarily as a poet, teacher, and editor (more on that here), I have always enjoyed working with physical materials and crafting things by hand. Over the past two decades, I have taken courses at the Center for Book Arts, and I use some of those techniques and tools in my work. Other than that, and a basic college course in drawing and painting years ago, I am mostly self-taught. 

I am partial to whimsy, mystery, charm, improvisation, oddity, and miniature. I like riddles and visual puns. If you share these predilections, I hope you find these creations satisfactory.