I make temporary theatrical site-specific installations using found materials and everyday arts and craft supplies. In an exuberant three-dimensional scene akin to a stage set, I explore sentimentality, absurdity, nostalgia for my 1980s suburban girlhood, and the disconnect between our realities and expectations. I am also trying to simulate the experience of wonder and discovery we have with the natural world in an interior setting. Once the work is complete, I document, deinstall, and discard. Photographs and a few small physical keepsakes become the only remaining evidence of the installation’s existence. Some keepsakes weave their way into future installations getting a second chance in a new context.

In between the labor-intensive installations, I use a stream-of-consciousness process to create lots of drawings and collage as a way to work out visual motifs, color, texture, light, and illusion. My work feels most electric when tapping into the earliest techniques I learned as a child in school and summer camp. I color, cut, draw, tear, glue. Repetition and reproduction are my way of really getting to know a subject; by exhausting the possibilities of a single shape, color combination or pattern, I gain a kind of focus and understanding of things in the world.