Artist Statement

I’m a collagist. I steal fragments (a vision, a scrap of overheard talk, a body, a moment in time) and cut them together until a seam splits open. I move between performance, visual art, movement, music, and the garden, and I often find the answer to one piece inside another.

I keep returning to the face, and to the masks we’re handed: the courtesan, the mother, the filtered self, the woman reduced to an image. My work asks what is under all the masks? My answer, so far, is not a hidden true self but a quality of attention: playful, absorbed, and awake. It’s the way a girl pays attention before she learns she’s being looked at. When I cut a face out of a collage, what shows through is the land.

In my plays, I build thresholds and hold them open. I set a table; we break bread, sing, drink wine. Inside that room, the wild thing arrives on its own: the dead show up, the plague leaks into the party, the animal breaks through the mother. I don’t write what erupts; I just build the opening and tend to it. And I hand the audience the doubleness I’ve always needed - a borrowed name, a mask, a character to hide inside - so that being seen and being hidden can happen at once.

I call this the Want-Both: wild and domestic, seen and hidden, Madonna and whore. Collage is the form that can hold both without forcing a choice. It’s my training ground for staying in the middle, a little scared, very much alive, and resisting the urge to bolt for false certainty.

The garden and the animals are where I re-tune and where I learn about death daily: things grow, things die, everything returns to the soil. Sex and death and communitas are the thresholds no structure can fully wall off, and they’re what make everything else matter.

We’re living at thresholds: ecological, technological, political, personal. In a world that sells our attention back to us, I want to build places where we can recover it together.