Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can...
—W.B. Yeats
The Circus Animals’ Desertion [excerpt]

My sculpture combines the industrial with the totemic.
Working with clay and found metal, along with stone, wood, fiber,
I create figures, mainly female, that stand as guardians, oracles, voices for the voiceless.

My passion is for the hypnotic images of the streets.
When Allen Ginsberg writes in his poem, Howl, “You never were no locomotive, Sunflower,
you were a sunflower!” I root for the locomotive.
Images of “black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded,”
the “dank muck and Razor sharp artifacts of the past” are what resonate.

So it is not a surprise that I sweep the streets, trolley tracks,
and the back of gas stations looking for discarded rusted metal, twisted branches,
stones, or any other eye-catching, compelling piece of debris.
To me they look like treasure, like the implements or adornments of ritual.

All these find their way into my sculpture--as they have since the violent death of
a young cousin in Somalia, a victim of the chaos in Mogadishu.
After I heard, I saw differently. A veil was lifted.

From that time on, clay has taken shape for me immediately and passionately,
as from some collective unconscious, a place I had never reached before.
Whatever stuff I pick up is consumed by a series of figures.

I gather roots and branches ripped from trees by storms;
rocks shattered by machinery, spit up chiseled by volcanic eruptions
or washed smooth by seas from Maine to Helsinki.
From Boston to Barcelona I hone in on promising dumpsters
looking for treasures.
The breakdown of my car becomes cause of celebration as I am handed
a new piece of metal to animate my work.

Standing alone or in chorus, as in the installations,
Dream of the Inner Voice: Bearing Witness and Phalanx of the Long-Necked Women,
my figures appear to chant, speak out, bear witness,
rail against injustice.

Lately, my figures are emerging as images of transformation,
as in Brownstone with Blue Boa, and Seated Woman with Branches,
becoming the site of cosmological eruptions as in Small Blue Galaxy.

I work intuitively, never knowing in advance where my work will take me. In the studio, I start with the head.
When I see the face, I am drawn towards particular found objects. I push and pierce these materials into the clay
and mold clay around them. Objects and clay interact. As the object transforms the figure, the object is itself
transformed. Refuse is reborn.

I use clay that hardens at 250° F, enabling found objects to be worked into my pieces from their inception.
My figures emerge in one long sitting—whole but not finished. After hardening, the figures are variously
sanded, carved, polished, reconfigured (for example, some of the metal, stone, or wood is eventually removed,
imprints revealed) over a period of weeks or months, until I know in my bones that the piece has taken on
a life of its own, a new figure of an old soul.