My work includes large-scale gelatin-silver prints and archival pigment prints. For fifteen years I made still-life images of specimens collected and preserved for scientific study. Since 2008 I have worked with poets to incorporate text into images that are photo-based and incorporate drawing, painting, and software artifacts. Statements about the individual portfolios are below:

Madonna Comix is based on eleven poems about a metaphoric Madonna. The poems speak to the multiple experiences of being a woman, especially the profound physical and emotional ones of childbearing and child rearing. Our fears, the life-choices we make, the things we take on faith are addressed.  In deciding on an approach to the poems, I kept in mind both the reverent, secular, and (to use Celia’s term) “smart-alecky” nature of the text.  

I grew up with “Little Lulu” comic books—a proto-feminist voice in the 1950’s.  For this project I photographed and altered “Little Lulu” comic book pages to use as visual grounds for the pieces. Importantly, these also provided me with a way to introduce a second, down-to-earth voice in response to Celia’s lyric one, by incorporating text from the comic book page.  The Christian Madonna is the source of a rich iconography that I reference in the images. Although the work is no longer recognizable as photography (my working process here is much like that of painting), photographically derived imagery is central. The figures are based on my negative archive. I made additional photographs to use as needed.

This project began with photographs I made of the blood from a slaughtered sheep that was collecting and coagulating in a tub. I emailed them to Celia and she responded with a story in which race, class and familial relations ride the Carolina Crescent on contours of blood. As Celia states, "Blood is Time bears the distressed text of a young woman’s misadventures as she misses a train; Blood Kin, a climactic moment in a Day’s Inn; and Passing Strange, riding the rails as she attempts to escape a past, pulsing like blood. The scrawled lines of text mimic the vehicles of the girl’s travels -- corvette, taxi and train – veering along the byways of blood and race and sex. As one reads the fragmented phrases overlaying the bloodscape, one might imagine much-read maps of intersecting routes. Blood remembrance underlies this collaboration of text and image. Blood, as the saying goes, always tells."

In our first collaboration for "The Poetic Dialogue Project," we alluded to the conventions of specimen collection and preservation for scientific study that have occupied me for many years, and to Elisabeth's interest in importing specialized language into lyric poetry. We hoped to bridge scientific and lyric ways of knowing.  The photographed sheets of paper (front and back in each diptych) ‘impersonate’ the specimen paper used in herbariums, with stains and imperfections. For the imagery I used photographs of spider webs, scanned drawings, penciled notations, red-bordered labels, and inked text. Elisabeth used Latin terminology to reference descriptive taxonomy, including genus, species, and measurements. 

Arachne explores text and image as integral to one another. Handwriting appears as scientific notation and poetic phrase, just as the web is both a visual and a glyphic trace. Silk thread appears in the ‘ballooning’ that launches spiderlings into new habitats [0001], in the web’s role in capturing prey [0003], and in doubling as food [0004]. Finally, we retell the myth of Arachne (in 0005), whose acts of creation our work also honors.

The Marine Algae Project includes  Celebration, and Evidence of Its Occurrence. In the spring of 2003 I spent a month at the Whiteley Center residence at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island. In particular, I went there to photograph in the marine algae herbarium.  In pigment prints, the physicality of the ink on paper closely mimics the pressed algae specimens, and the prints take on attributes of graphic media such as watercolor or pastel. The shapes of the seaweeds in Celebration suggest chalices raised in toast. Evidence of its Occurrence takes its name from text I found on a specimen card that carried just a stain of what had once been preserved. It refers to the value of collecting, preserving, and identifying as a basis for scientific knowledge and understanding.  The words takes on elegiac resonance in this age of habitat depletion, species extinction, and a worming planet.

In Cartwheel Suite, a series of six 40" x 50" gelatin silver prints, I used the bones of a disarticulated calf.  I stored the bones in a corrugated box that had contained large sheets of mat board.  One evening, the light in my basement studio transformed the bones into a luminous figure, suggesting to me a "dance of death."  I made alterations to the box and made several 8 x 10" photographs of arrangements of the bones until the "cartwheel" movement developed. The painted and delaminated box can be perceived in various ways (as stage curtains, coffin fabric, candy wrappers, and so on). Together, the six images depict an acrobatic sequence in which the expressions of the figures are joyous and have a spirit of high good humor.  The juxtaposition of the cartwheel and the skeletal materials suggests the Epicurean injunction, carpe diem, "seize the day."

This selection, from the Comparative Anatomy series, seeks to re-create the experience of anticipation and revelation that I had when I first opened the boxes of specimens from Reed College.  With the diptych form I was able to give equal weight to the covers of the boxes and their contents. The layers of text--labels and postmarks--on the candy, cigar, and scientific-supply storage containers provide historic and ironic contexts.

I made a sequence of sixteen grids with foot bones of cat skeletons. The changing arrangement of the bones from one grid to the next is reflected in the various grid structures, which are made with string, thread, and nails.  The grids refers to navigation (finding one's way through the unknown), archaeology (discovering order in chaos), and text.  There is movement--a building up, a breaking apart, a falling down--in the sequence.