20″ x 26″
ink on Basingwerk
Ohio Arts Council interview with the artist
My work has been inspired by several conceptual and formal concerns. I have a background in textiles and weaving and have always had an attraction to geometric patterning, fields and structures. Earlier drawings were based on the idea of safety nets – both literally and figuratively. Each drawing begins with a grid of interlocking pentagons and substructures of triangles, chevrons, squares, Xs and diagonals. Drawn in freehand, the forms accumulate intuitively in a way that responds to influences of process, time, and life. More recently, the drawings have been informed by the migraine auras that I occasionally experience — shimmering, expanding zigzags of colors. The underlying grid structure of the current body of work has been simplified to interlocking squares and titled “form constants”, a term coined by Gestalt psychologist Heinrich Kluver, to refer to geometric hallucinations.
