I create personally meaningful art that combines careful craft with conceptual integrity. My work often consists of arranged collections of everyday objects, presented in some sort of container so that it makes a statement. It’s a mash-up of social activism, conceptualism, storytelling and autobiography.

The dolls started as a way to process the deteriorating toys rescued from my mom’s attic into art so that they could be thrown away without guilt. Over the course of that effort some of the pieces turned into portraits of people I know and others turned into social commentary dealing with issues around the ways American culture represents and shapes the “ideal female”.

Not long after finishing the initial doll painting series, I lost my breasts in a brief but intense battle with cancer. By choosing not to go through reconstruction, I suddenly found myself as “exhibit A” on the topic of cultural impositions on women going too far. The dolls, with their distortions, seams, and cultural symbolism, came back in a whole new body of work that is more active and purposeful than ever before.