From a young age I've been making art in any way I can. I remember never being able to draw things the way I saw them in my head so I experimented with many mediums before landing on collage. Cutting, tearing, collecting, and gluing papers became my language and for many years I used books and magazines, comic books, found papers, and anything inexpensive I could get my hands on to create stories in my pieces. I collaged on old doors and cabinets. I collaged my furniture. I made concert posters when my bands played our small shows. Somewhere along the way I started tearing the books and magazines to isolate the colors and textures of the pages rather than cutting out actual images.
Living in Leadville, Colorado was my greatest inspiration. I didn't have galleries or museums to draw from way up in the Rockies. I was surrounded by the highest mountains in Colorado and spent all of my free time exploring trails and parks and the old mining districts on the east side of town. I loved taking photos everywhere I went and eventually I thought I'd attempt to recreate some of my favorite mountains in my torn paper style.
For years I continued to experiment with found and collected papers, construction papers, and fun patterned papers to make my landscapes, but something was missing to me. My work didn't express the rawness of a rock face or the movement of a river. It felt shiny and impersonal. For Christmas one year my mom gave me a pack of mulberry paper she bought on a whim. I had it in my studio for a few months before I opened it and felt the texture in my hands. I loved the way the edges frayed when I tore the mulberry paper. The fibers broke open in random ways and when I glued them down they overlapped in a soft edged impressionistic way. I realized quickly this is how I wanted my work to look. Mulberry paper led me to searching for new papers. I found kozo that gave my water movement. Lokta had bold patterns and flourishes of marbling that caught my eye immediately. Marbled papers could be interspersed beside the natural fiber papers. Bits of plant matter in pine fiber paper, chirri, Mayan huun, and more allowed my work to feel more rich with plant texture. Died teek leaves and whole flowers gave my work an even thicker texture. Cork paper, burlap, and even sand papers and leather and the occasional thread or fabric made the foregrounds of my work come alive and give the landscapes depths beyond what I'd imagined.
I'm still on the search for new, interesting, textured papers. I've played around with making my own papers using scraps of my other papers but mostly I like to honor the paper makers from all over the world who make the beautiful materials I turn into my art.
I want to return the landscapes I see around me to their original state. I like to remove buildings, bridges, and any manmade structures from my landscapes. I want to feel these places as an extension of myself. My aim is to incorporate the places that I visit into my sense of self. I am the place that I am in, there is no separation between the character and the setting. The American West speaks to me and through me in my work and I seek to know my self better through my interaction with it, through every piece, pieced together.
