Where Are You From?
Denver, CO, USA
Where do you long to live (reality or fantasy)?
Up on my husband’s and my 60 acres in western Colorado. It is so beautiful, filled with all sorts of wildlife, ancient cedar trees and magic! The older I get, the more I dislike the city and yearn to get back to nature, to a simplier and quieter life – which I can only imagine will lead to some incredible art making.
What started you on your journey into art professionally?
Our first conversations would be about the story of the book it was created from – like a two person book club. It probably would want to know why I chose the lines/chapters to form my piece around. Did it feel like I honored it as a book or did it feel butchered.
Once the tech talk was done, I would love to hear about all the places the book lived before coming to me, all the people it knew and all the things it had seen. How often was it read or did it just sit on the shelf, looking stately.
In what ways do you think your personal experiences and emotions shape the way you connect with your work?
I definitely fall on the introvert side of things. Books lend themselves to be the best of friends with introverts so it makes sense to me that it is my medium of choice. I can get lost in the stories, become one with the characters without actually having to socialize with other humans.
My background is in AutoCAD, specifically creating technical fabrication drawings for residential and commercial kitchens. Over the past three years I have started using CAD as a design tool in my art which has allowed me to create more detailed and dimensional work.
I am pretty emotionally detached from my work. I love creating however it is that process of creating that I love. Once a piece is done I am ready for the next one.
What is the most unexpected thing to occur with your work through the years that shifted your perspective in a way you never anticipated?
Initially it wast that people want to pay me for my art. My older sister was always the artist so the last art class I took was in 6th grade. I loved making art however I wanted my own identity so I created solely for me. I would give pieces away as gifts never knowing if the receivers really even wanted or liked my art.
It wasn’t until I got married that I even thought about creating art that would hang in a gallery and sell to a complete stranger. My husband not only believed in my art skills, he got me my first show. Sometimes it just takes someone believing in us for us to be able to see who we really are.
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Have you ever imagined your art as a time capsule—what do you think future generations would think of it?
I haven’t. Depending on how far out in the future, people might not even know what a book is, or they might only know them as antiquity – pieces in a museum – and wonder why someone would take something so rare and cut it up to create art with.
