I grew up moving around.

Cultural shifts were dramatic. As a child I adapted habitually, stretching into new shapes to conform to every territory I found myself immersed in. I spent most of my adult life fighting a feeling of perpetual rootlessness… until I discovered motorcycles.

When I learned to ride at age 37, traveling became central to my art practice, providing ways to connect to environments and perspectives outside my own prior experience. The motorcycle was an easy conversation-starter, as most were surprised to see a small-statured woman traveling distances alone on a bike. It inspired me to reconsider how I’d felt about space, movement, and the volatile, cyclical action of the machine itself, in relation to the workings of our own bodies. When in motion, a moto and rider slice through space together as one unit, exposed and unprotected, physically a part of the environment they pass through. Functioning as a conduit, a motorcycle becomes a powerful connector, a means through which to better understand oneself in relation to the outside world.

In a broad range of media, I respond to these connections, to memories and experiences accumulating throughout life - and to dichotomies emerging from technology and processes we deploy to achieve pleasure, comfort and safety.

My most recent drawings, embroideries and mixed-media installations explore the psychology of borrowed time and the fragility of the body in relation to systems we build that sustain and grow our economies, yet are often responsible for resource exhaustion, climate change and social inequity. I’m drawn to tensions between things that don’t fit together neatly, yet co-exist in our peripheral vision or beneath our feet, that hum from behind locked boiler rooms or subtly obscure horizons with glinting metal, smoking flares and polluted haze.  Within decayed, crumbling buildings; tangled but ordered, unspeakably powerful mechanical systems; and tenacious plants and animals that survive, even thrive, despite lengths we go to control them – I find emotional cocktails of awe, disgust, desire, fear, excitement and hope.

The hope comes from recognizing that somewhere buried in these forms are signifiers of our human vulnerability. The acknowledgement of vulnerability opens space for empathy – and from acts of empathy arise possibilities for positive global change.