1. Confessions... the start of something

I thought it would be interesting to start this blog with a frame for my work and its inspiration.  

My past includes training and working as an RN at a major teaching hospital in Boston for 13 years.  I've also raised two children into adulthood.  Ideas around women's work, care based activities, concepts of labor and feminism occupy the core of my thought process when creating art.  

Yarn and crochet conjure thoughts of sweaters and stuffed toys, but those ideas are humorously subverted by coupling them with the generative body.

My art and herbalism are the same, expressed differently.

The crocheted forms that emerge from domestic objects, the yarn microbiome sculptures, the upcycled plastic work — all of them are asking the same question the shop asks every day: what is the relationship between a human body and the living systems it depends on?

The sculptures make that question visible. The herbalism makes it actionable.

Both practices are rooted in the same understanding. Plants and humans co-evolved. The microorganisms that live in us are the same ones that live in soil. A crocheted form that looks like a gut lining and a tincture that supports one are not two different things. They are the same conversation in two different languages.

Ceremony runs through both too. A healing ritual and a performance piece occupy the same space: they ask you to slow down, pay attention, and acknowledge that something larger than the individual is at work. Healers in every culture understood this as they combined plants with intention.

I did not plan it this way. My art led me to herbalism, and herbalism deepened my art. What I make and what I offer to my clients are both reminding the body of what it already knows.

In this sculpture below, discarded but well-used objects from the domestic space allude to the end of my time being fully occupied by the needs of my children and former spouse.