ARTIST STATEMENT

“If you work with your hands, you’re a laborer. If you work with your hands and your mind, you’re a craftsman.
If you work with your hands and your mind and your heart, you’re an artist.”
-Saint Francis Assisi

When my mother died, I was left with her house and her garden. The garden, with its cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth, has become my physical, spiritual and metaphorical muse. It’s become a symbol and source; a mainstay of  my work as it conjures memory, loss, and renewal. My paper sculptures emerge from this landscape -  layered, stitched, grounded. 

I begin with a photograph; a captured moment in real time. I cut, fold, sew, and sculpt the printed imagery into three-dimensional paper forms.  My process is slow, repetitive and meditative: a quiet ritual of reconstruction that reflects the emotional labor of honoring, remembering and making meaning. I re-construct, re-envision and re-create; often transforming scale to affect the viewer’s proprioception and sense of movement through space. 

Within this process of creating, I have come to understand a critical piece of my internal being: I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Although once a truth that felt too heavy to hold, I now welcome it as an imperative call to honor, remember and share stories that tie me to my Jewish lineage - both past and present day. 

We are all our mother’s gardens—tended and wild, cultivated and inherited. My work exists in that space in-between; between image and object, between past and present, between rupture and repair. It is within this space that I seek beauty, inviting the viewer to pause, reflect and feel.