I am a multidisciplinary artist and an educator. My teaching role requires me to be well versed in all of the core artistic mediums so I will often combine drawing with ceramics, drawing with sculpture, metalwork with ceramics and so forth.
I’m very inspired by stories, although reading was always a struggle for me. I have dyslexia that went undiagnosed until I was in college. After being diagnosed, the literary world opened up to me. Stories became my drug and--as an artist--my mind went wild illustrating the stories in my head. I soon discovered that the heroes of narratives were not always the most interesting characters, and that I was more interested in “minor” characters--often female ones. Those were the characters who spoke to me and to my struggles.
I find that reinterpreting a story through art is a powerful way to view the past. Works of historical significance don't need to linger in the time period in which they were written--they can be viewed through the eyes of today.
My most recent work utilizes these ideas in ceramics and illustration. Though I teach ceramics, I don’t consider myself a potter, but I have mastered a difficult technique for illustrating on pots. These functional ceramic pieces serve both as the canvas for the illustrations and as a metaphor for women’s bodies. Women are often seen as curvaceous vessels of male dominance, yet in my work they appear as vessels for their own intelligence and anger.
On a recent trip to NYC, I spent hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art studying the forms and illustrations of ancient Greek pottery. My research on the ways these works tell a story helped inform and devise the next phase of my artistic career. I wanted to tackle Homer’s Odyssey.
In the Odyssey, I focused on Penelope, Odysseus’s wife. Throughout the twenty years that Odysseus was gone, Penelope underwent years of harassment by potential suitors--powerful warrior-elites who tried to get her to believe that her husband was dead, each hoping that he could marry Penelope and gain access to Odysseus’s kingdom. The suitors invaded her home, ate her food, threatened her son, assaulted her servants, and pressured her to remarry. In resisting the suitors Penelope had to use all of her resources, showing herself to be as courageous, wily, and brilliant a figure as Odysseus. In so doing she had to hide her anger from powerful men who controlled her future. The courage of her resistance is the inspiration for my interpretation.
In Phase One of my project--which was exhibited at the Canton Museum of Art from April to July of 2018--I viewed Penelope’s story from the perspective of the #metoo movement and the Women’s Marches. I interpret recent events in which women have publicly resisted some of the most powerful men in the country.