Yellowtantrums

What I cannot or do not want to communicate with words, I express energetically and emotionally through painting. This can include dislodging and disrupting our digestion of mainstream art in ways that are not overt or extreme, but consistent and prodding and simplified.

There is an act to provide a container for the dark and the light through a process of reclamation and annihilation that is visible in my process-- a holding of the opposites is the "mess on display" for the viewer to project their own unconscious experience on.

I presently achieve this with acrylic paint and associated mediums, sometimes incorporating charcoal, ink, paper and wax. I manipulate materials with steel, cloth, knives, hard plastics, and my body -- rarely using traditional tools like paintbrushes.

I am interested in my body as the primary tool for creating image as raw emotion through movement, disruption, stillness. There is chaos as well as order and peace -- an aftermath and sometimes forefront. The images are often simple, allowing for the own viewers projective experience.

I see music, flow and dance in abstract form. I believe in the ability of art to challenge oppressive structure-- through tearing, stripping, demolishing layers inclusive of technique, presentation, order -- the revelation of peeling back to reveal what is underneath or to maintain what is hidden. These are themes primary in my profession as a psychotherapist and social worker, and difficult or limitating to convey as a poet.

My paintings are both refuge and liberating space from daily constraint and emanate both my subjective and physical experience of being in the world.

As a poet, I have gravitated torward women's issues, themes of oppression and power, as well as the fragmentation of psyche in realms of conditional madness. Thriving, surviving and/or failure to do so are common undercurrents, as well as the fluidity of time and space. My poems are lyrical, wandering, imagistic and ecologically reflective of parallels between body and land