I began making Quilts as art objects using a Singer sewing machine in the early sixties. In the early seventies I progressed to an industrial embroidery machine for assembly and quilting. At the same time, I began staining portions of images with fabric paint and drawing with light fast markers, always taking care to use archival fabrics like cotton and silk. I was strongly influenced by the American quilt tradition, both pieced and appliquéd, as well as the folk art tradition generally. The quilt genre supported my pleasure in making simple, abstracted figurations that carry archetypal or symbolic, nonverbal meanings. It satisfied a playful urge to invent and articulate patterns in borders and across fields of trapunto relief quilting. It is like my more current work making illuminated, calligraphic pages. My resource for ornamental pattern is, of course, Nature; and outcome emerges in an indirect, intuitive way from a sensory databank created by years of routine, devoted observation.

As a figurative artist who began as a painter, I first conceived sculpture in color. Translucent, tinted polyester resin satisfied this vision, and I produced works cast in this medium throughout the 70’s. Most, along with the quilts that accompanied their showing, were sold through my Chicago dealer, Mack Gilman. Though sensual and seductive, polyester resin turned out to be too toxic to handle, both to the artist and the environment, so I turned to cast stone, a finely aggregated concrete that accepts surface color staining. It’s an earthier, ceramic like material, but labor intensive. These works, also accompanied by quilts, succeeded in the marketplace. However, after I returned to RISD to teach in 1986, I stopped making “work on spec” and worked only by commission. This is when bronze entered the picture, first in the execution of raised letter bronze plaques, then in a trial casting of a 1972 self-portrait. I grew comfortable enough with bronze to undertake other works, among them a major commission, and now more recently the Sophia sculpture.

I have always been fascinated by folk art, by its unequivocal and colorful staging of archetypes—images like those found in fairy tales, myths, and dreams. For some works, like the Hecate series, I chose earthenware and used techniques like slip casting, hand-building, and terra sigillata surfacing. But, like so much of sculpture, these techniques—along with the firing stages—seemed to encumber the creative process and delay outcome. I am returning now to the low tech materials I use in the altar pieces, because they enable the more direct, spontaneous outcomes that I could achieve in drawing and painting, and that seem also to characterize the folk art tradition.

My Illuminated Pages are more than calligraphy. They are my vehicle for designing with pattern and letter forms, including calligraphy as one element. My sources and influences are twofold: Nature, the great composer of pattern and form; and our (mostly Western) Legacy Calligraphic Art. All of this work is done by commission.