Artist Statement:

I work eclectically, with a passion for using traditional printmaking and mixed media sculptural techniques to express my deeply researched contemporary concerns and concepts about the sensory perception of language. I use player piano scrolls, their boxes as well as the copper plates to make my matrices. Using these plates and elements as my visual vocabulary,  I express what I call  the “space between silence and sound.” 

Scrip(t) Scraps, explores—in both print medium and copper and mixed media sculpture—the performative and subjective nature of punctuation.  As a Hearing Impaired artist who relies on hearing aids and lip reading, I investigate how visual language can be used to evoke and depict the inevitable dissonance between what we encode (visual, verbal, oral communication) and what is decoded by recipients of our communications.  

Scrip(t) Scraps aims to embody the volatile nature of language, particularly how punctuation can so radically alter how we interpret meaning.  My collaged materials, symbols, use of shadow and scale shifts, perform these concepts.   For instance, the stuffed Question Mark explodes its shredded, printed contents, pushing them out of its porous mesh, leaving remnants that invite varied and subjective responses.  The etched and inked copper parentheses— on hinges that open and close—perform how these symbols are used in written text to denote information that can move inside and out. 

Throughout the installation, I hang cut intaglio and relief prints to produce shadows: visual equivalents for the lingering echoes we often have when we receive language.  I repeat the phrases “What YOU Already KNOW” and “What WE Already KNEW to dramatize how the slight change in tense as well as the insertion of punctuation in different places transforms rhythm and meaning.  For over two decades, player piano scrolls have been both the inspiration and basis for my visual inquiries into how we perceive oral and written language.  The digital-like holes in the scrolls—the absence—indicate the presence of sound.  Consequently, they are a near-perfect material metaphor for my visualization of the space where dissonance and subjectivity are manifest.