RECENT WORK
“Come Hither,” “Clivia Unbound,” “The Mind’s Garden,” “What to Do?”, “Flight”
Since 2017 I have used the lower, dried-up section of an elderly clivia plant as the source for 5 bodies of related work. The section is made up of the papery parts of cut off dead leaves and worm-like rootlets jutting out. In retrospect, I see that working on paper with my plant helped me adapt to late-in-life concerns of mortality, loss, and resilience. Over time I became improvisational in my work and began to accept unpredictability and not knowing in my life. And after a hiatus, I could return to art making, as a person in her 80’s.
The “Come Hither” drawings, using dark brown pen, are closely cropped, compressed images, built up with linear marks. They seem both floral and papery, yet also sharp and secretive. There is invitation and seduction, and at the same time menace and danger. There is also a pleasing ambiguity about what one is looking at. I am drawn to these qualities. The work has a dark feel to it, with conflicting feelings imbedded. Those feelings are reactions to both the actual source material, and to the emotional impact of earlier stages of my husband’s 9 year dementia journey.
Subsequently, with the “Clivia Unbound” series, I explored using two colors on either side of semi-transparent Duralar, along with the white of the page, not to describe space, but to conceptually establish color areas for potential print making. The resulting artwork is more abstract, open, and flat that the Come Hither drawings.
During 2018 and 2019 I spent sessions of collaborative printing with master printer, Carolyn Muscat. Although we’d begin with up to 20 sheets of paper and tended to print on all of them, in varying ways, before going on to our next layer, there were many printing layers for each finished monprint. The imagery is freer, lighter, and improvisational. I played, mixed things up, took risks. I’d never worked this way before, and found it exhilarating. The results conjured up The Mind’s Garden to me, giving me joy. It’s not clear to me where these images reside — are they only in the mind, do they exist out in space, or under water? I don’t know.
The What to Do? series added black as a color, which brought back a tension I’ve liked in previous work. My process in Carolyn’s print shop, and back in my studio, was similar to that of The Mind’s Garden series, so different from my previous practice. The unpredictability and not knowing of these pieces excited me because they looked like something I never could have imagined ahead of time.
Flight, from 2022-2025, is the most recent in these series. Flight uses high flow acrylic on paper. These, too, have botanical references to the old clivia plant, or to roots seen in the Public Garden during Covid walks. Covid and the final years of my husband George’s life were stressful and unpredictable, as was reassessing my life after his death, learning the challenges of aging, and living alone. Intermittently I got back into my studio and used the not knowing approach of the 2019 monoprints to paint on paper. I picked up my pace in 2025, adding a new challenge, to leave the white of the page. Again, never could I have imagined the final artwork! This process, and the repetitive mark making I do, give me joy, challenge, and a new sense of freedom, for which I am grateful.