I am a visual and performing artist living and working on ten acres of rainforest in Chimacum, Washington. The path that led me here was a circuitous one. After earning graduate degrees in East Asian languages and history, I left academia for an independent career as a translator, editor, and book designer, and eventually sought through art and dance to explore the places that words could not take me.

I first came to the Olympic Peninsula twenty years ago, drawn by these mountains, forests, and waters and the wildness and mystery still present here. Living as a part of this immense landscape has informed my work in many ways, infusing it with a sense of time and motion, the flow and rhythms of nature. The layering, splitting, segmenting, and rejoining in many of my pieces stems from this.

I have also been deeply affected by years of residence in Japan, and the study of its arts, religion, and culture. Japan and Zen Buddhist practice instructed me in the value of emptiness, silence, and stillness—but also revealed the necessity of careful attention to form, texture, placement, and proportion. Improvisational interaction with materials and composition interests me more than the execution of preconceived concepts or ideas. The work emerges out of an open-ended inquiry, an ongoing dialogue with the sensate world I inhabit.

My work is not representational. But I see these pieces as concrete, not abstract. I am making objects, not pictures. My intention is to evoke rather than to express, to provide viewers with material for their own contemplative experience, not a predetermined narrative. I wish to share with them something that cannot be articulated in any other form.