Like so many artists, I’ve always been an artist from a young age. And like so many artists, I’m also neurodivergent, with a brain that bounces from idea to idea like a ping-ball shot out of a cannon into a narrow hallway. And like so many neurodivergent people, I’ve learned to wear a mask to be more accepted, to try to fit into a world that has always felt like an ill-fitting, itchy gilly suit.

Me, dressed as a litterbug in a costume I made at around age 11. — My ten-year old self in a handmade costume depicting a litterbug.

So who is the real me, as an artist? Though for years my work has been outwardly focused, I’ve always made things the world barely sees, since the one thing the art market wants is consistency. I’ve changed my work often and always noticed that people would want what I had done five years ago…I moved through ideas too fast for people to track them while only seeing curated parts of my prolific studio activity in the gallery, my practice through a macro lens. The thread that runs through my work has often been more conceptual, and I’ve used the meaning embedded in materiality - the history, the context, the source - as the link between various bodies of work. My concerns for the environment became the binding idea within the work, but only for what was shown…in the studio, the work I had always done continued to bubble to the surface. The work I made naturally, without conceptualizing or having a prior idea, just following the intuitive joys of color and composition, rooted in assemblage and collage.

And yet, I was told focus, focus…as though my deep hyper focused explorations of everything weren’t acceptable because they were too much…like I myself was often told I was. My career has been a continual tamping down, trying to fit in, trying to be what I was told would be most successful. Attempting to shape myself into that vaunted “consistency” that equates to a style, yet still, somehow, being told I was falling short of what was wanted. And yet, confusingly, many times I’ve been told that my style is instantly recognizable by those who have followed my career. A career that has had more ups and downs than a graph of California’s seismic activity, if I’m being honest with myself. However also: a career that I have never wavered in my commitment too, despite the demands of a working class life and survival in a city going through an economic explosion that threatened to decimate us all. Because to give up feels like dying.

Recently, a financial mentor asked me why I was in business, and the question confused me. I never wanted to be a “business” - no artist dreams of financial entrepreneurship, which in part is why most of us are pretty bad at it. When I mumbled a reason, she corrected me: “no, to make money”, followed with the question: “and what do you do if you don’t make money?” Again, I stared at her in confusion, this being, like so many artists, a norm I had been taught to expect. Her answer was firm: “you close the business”. My brain exploded…what did THAT even look like? After pursuing this even before I was an adult, who knows how much invested in materials and equipment (a number that as a business, I’m sure I should know)...but worse, what am I if not an artist? I told her I didn’t even know what that looked like, because I AM the business. She pushed back on this idea strongly, but no amount of push-back can get me to see it another way…I’m an artist. If artists have to be businesses, I will adapt to that, but what I do is beyond the neoliberal economic framework thrust upon us…again, like so many artists.

Though the masked work has had success, and the intuitive work has sometimes pushed its chaotic way into the more polished conceptual work, I’ve shoved my weird little aggregations into the background, encouraged to do so in grad school, by galleries, and through trying to satisfy what I thought the market would bear. But in doing so, I’ve cut off the deeply personal work that speaks to the real me, that comes to me as naturally as breathing. I’ve spent my life as an artist trying to satisfy others, without truly knowing myself. But deeper self-knowledge has led me to crave the making of those works, as I’ve had the busiest year I’ve ever had, mostly making the conceptual environmental work that, though I love it and believe in its importance, is usually proposed well in advance and thought through carefully, as opposed to allowing myself to just…breath. To make what comes out naturally, to allow myself to follow every crazy impulse in the studio, which should be a place of freedom, ideally.

Shot of work in progress in the studio, 2014.

I was a late bloomer, spending my early years making comics and jewelry, collecting junk to make into installations in my warehouse home and making collages out of everything around me. A natural polymath, I played in punk bands and acted in Fassbinder plays, wrote poetry and essays and drew constantly, everywhere. After aimless years of waitressing and beginning to show in co-op galleries with artists who had degrees, I wandered into Metro State and asked how to go to school, urged to by my mother who had no idea how to do it herself, so naive I didn’t even know people compared schools or wrote applications to the Ivy Leagues…just hoping that I could stop having my ass grabbed serving cocktails. While I’m thankful for my education and do think it was a net positive, I had the constant feeling that I didn’t fit in (which honestly, has never left me in any situation), and I often wonder what I would have become if left to my own devices. Thanks to my participation in Hector, a comics collective started by Tom Motley, I had already been published in 7 countries and translated into Portuguese by the time I took my first class. A class that had me changing majors out of the art department thanks to Craig Marshall Smith, a revered drawing professor whose work directly copied his teachers, Marshall Arisman and Richard Diebenkorn, who wrote a red “F” across the drawing I’d spent 7 hours on, arguably one of the best on the wall but drawn on the wrong sized paper because that’s what I had and it was a choice between his preferred paper and dinner. And thus my troubles began.

I made my rounds through the English and Philosophy departments (leaving philosophy after I was told there “were no great women philosophers”) and had a brief flirtation in Industrial Design, before I returned to Art, after an unsuccessful attempt to participate in the new “make your own degree” idea. An idea that failed because the English, Art , Theater, and Music departments insisted that I take the core requirements in each to create my imagined degree in “installation and performance”...categories that did not really exist in the early nineties in a state school. I returned to art, still showing at the co-op Edge Gallery, and in painting professor Andrew Speer’s class confessed that though I was selling the work I had been making regularly (assemblages mostly in found vintage medicine cabinets) I felt pulled more towards abstraction. “OH”, he huffed, “You want to be a MANUFACTURER, this is a class for PAINTERS”, before turning on his heel and walking away. In my star-struck naivete, I thought these were pearls of deep wisdom, as opposed to classist nonsense bordering on educational malpractice from a tenured professor who won the generational lottery. It took me years to unpack this, but at the time, I loyally set foot on the path to becoming a “serious” artist. Despite my strong pull towards sculpture in my earlier work, I thought painting was taken “more seriously”, and besides - the sculpture teacher didn’t think girls could be sculptures, and regularly took tools out of our hands. But each time my work veered towards the sculptural, and it often did, Andrew would tell me it “looked too much like sculpture”, reminding me that “sculpture is what you back into when you’re looking at paintings”.

A self-portrait drawn at the age of 23, walking down the infamous Colfax Avenue in Denver.

By graduation, I’d found a way to corral my work into something that could be seen as a style: using the structure of a grid that could be endlessly rearranged, I could explore different materialities and methods, creating the mash-ups I so loved of ideas and materials, which needn’t be similar as long as they had the confining structure. I made this work for many years and had great success with it, but over time, more and more people adopted this organizing principle, and I found myself aghast when I was at my own show and heard the gallerist tell someone balking at my prices that she had “another artist who worked the same way but was more affordable”. The grid series that served me well for years ended after 9-11, when I made my last big work, Elegy, infused with the somber feelings of the time and knowing that I needed to move on. The other work I’d been making, vaguely pornographic stuffed animal mash-ups, was popular and sold so well I had a waiting list, but with all of my galleries shuttered and starting over, it didn’t feel like what the world needed at that time.

Elegy, completed New Years Eve, 2021. 62” x 62” x 3”.

(This work is still available in storage, btw - contact me if you’re interested in giving it a home!)

After many years running a business and failing at a marriage, I returned to academia, where again, I faced the admonition to “focus”...even though arguably, what I was doing felt like focus to me. I made strange aggregations of sculptures and experimented endlessly, began working with bees, and took classes with undergrads with a thirst to learn even more processes to add to my arsenal. The great professor Malcolm Cochran at one point ordered me to “just choose three things to work on”, and astonished, I told him it felt like cutting off an arm. He didn’t understand what I meant, and I scarcely did myself, but I knew that I was only following breadcrumbs left by an indecisive and chaotic muse, and that eventually, they would converge and I would understand the connections between the paths. Professor Ann Hamilton (who I am forever grateful for, and whose simple words always seemed like a cryptic secret to decode) once told me that I “listen to too many people”. It took over ten years to understand what she meant, but I finally get it.

Early work from grad school exploring icebergs and oilspills. 2011, styrofoam and plastic.

At this point in my career, I’m ready to turn inward, though I have no intention of abandoning the environmental work that has been my passion for many years. But the surprise gift that my two years at Redline Contemporary Art gave me, after two years of isolation in the pandemic, was that my secret studio weirdos that I’d always been making alongside the more public work were right out in the open like dirty drawers in a surprise house inspection. Person after person would gravitate towards them, pulled magnetically to the unknown parts of my brain that were so rarely seen. And to my shock and surprise, they loved them. The vibrancy and weirdness were a delight, and I felt a glow of acceptance I hadn’t felt in a long time.

So who am I? Where am I going next? I’m as excited to find out as I hope you are. Somehow, I know these paths will converge too, and if I just give them a chance to may meld into some new, more integrated amalgam of my public and private selves. I’ve spent the last few years learning to embrace my neurodiverse weirdo self, and coming to terms with the fact that I’ll never really fit in anywhere. I love my brain, despite the struggles it gives me, and love the constant rush of ideas it gives me, ideas that I am tired of pushing to the side for the sake of market consistency. I’m excited to keep following my chaotic muse, though this time, I don’t plan to hold anything back; my freak flag is fully unfurled and I couldn’t tuck it back in any more than I could fold a map back into the shape it once was.

Who am I?