Artist Statement 1990 - 2004

These drawings emerge out of a fifteen-year investigation with drawing as a means of mapping and a crucible for inquiry: what is it to be a soul with a body? Can I record the experience accurately rather than “realistically”? The body experienced is a very different body from the one that we can see with our eyes. This process of questioning perception seems to tap into a collective body and a collective mind with infinite guises and expressions.

I work with both hands, and sometimes with eyes closed -- less a drawing technique than a drawing foray or approach. Drawing with two hands brings in the whole body-mind, and the visual result is an odd, liquid 3-dimensionality, similar to vision with two eyes, but with a different sense of form and space. Drawing in this way reveals but doesn't name. I call my approach “Somatic Drawing” (“somatic” refers to the body as a multi-layered experience). Presence in the act of drawing brings a presence to the image.

Paper seems to hold so much about the human need to communicate. Paper is still made of the most basic natural materials. It is like skin, and it is related inextricably to the ancient roots of language. Drawing also shares its roots with written words and characters. To make a mark has meaning, even if the meaning is not known before the mark is made. Drawing is an open language, unavoidably human and culturally eclectic. The naked mark on paper is the essence of our longing to connect.

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