I grew up in the gritty industrial landscape of Waterbury CT., a small city that was dominated by factories and nondescript neighborhoods. In contrast, my summers were spent on a 200-acre blueberry farm in southern Massachusetts that belonged to my grandparents. Picking berries and climbing rocks was a daily adventure for my cousin and myself. More than likely these summers laid the groundwork for my attachment to the landscape as the subject of much of my work.

By the time I was ready for college, applying to art school was my only real option. I landed at Pratt, in Brooklyn, and was off and running away from Central Connecticut and into the unpredictable bony embrace of New York City. Four years later I was encouraged to apply to the Yale Graduate Program and that’s how I fortuitously came to be in the right place, just in time to participate in the events of the radical 60’s.

The newly built Paul Rudolf A & A Building became my playground. Along with a small group of other interested graduates, I was invited to do an installation in this eccentric building. Each of us responded differently. I chose to do an installation in a narrow stairwell and was forced to confront the quirky Mannerist building that Paul Rudolf’s imagination conjured up. It was the first piece of art I had the opportunity to investigate in depth.

This experience fueled my work for many years to come. Immersing myself in imagined spaces within the limitations of my studio, became my focus.

When I got to New York, I became occupied with the outcroppings of Central Park as well as the cliff sections exposed by the cutting away of the granite to make way for our highways. This I felt was the extent of the natural world our society had been willing to preserve.

My work consisted of cliff inspired sculptures made from scrap paper and cardboard that I picked up in the streets of Soho They were light enough to be made in the scale of the actual formation. The transient materials and unlikely placement of these formations in a gallery or museum setting s underlined the role that nature, as i saw it, now played as a cultural artifact. Often, I’d work a year or more on one of these installations despite the transient nature of the materials I had chosen.

As a budding feminist, it was necessary for me to confront the values of the Renaissance, which I so admired as a student, with a radically new interpretation. My paper cliff sections were transient, contradictory and decidedly feminist as they questioned the very idea of permanence in art making as a value to be preserved.