The women depicted in the Dames of Anatomy series come from old glass negatives and discarded photos. They are nameless and unknown.

In Camera Lucida, the author Roland Barthes describes how he looks through many photographs of his mother but he cannot “find her.” He doesn’t recognize the soul of the woman he knows as his mother until he discovers a photograph of her as a little girl. The image captured the essence of what his memory told him was his mother. Of course, this image exists only for him. Anyone else would see only the ordinary, and this may be why he never published the image. He couldn’t stand the thought of the love for his mother – and the existence of such a love –being lost. 

 The women in Dames of Anatomy remind me of this lost love. I’ve reclaimed and combined them with anatomical illustrations, also taken from antique medical slides and ephemera. The women must contend with and accept their newly constructed biology, something even the female audience of today can appreciate. Biology isn’t everything, however.  Within my work there is an underlying presence of struggle and submission, evidence of a complex life.  Existence as a woman is, after all, not a simple fairytale.

Infectious Myth involves the creation of four mythical archetypes symbolizing transitional stages in the female life cycle. The androgynous innocence of youth, the first blood of puberty, the power of fertility and the final culminating source of wisdom are symbolic of the physiological phases that occur within the life of a woman. The process is, among other things, a cathartic response to the lack of unified myth and ritual in our young American culture. This project has been supported in part by a grant from Hungry's Gallery in Houston, TX and through a grant from the Barabara Deming Memorial Fund.

The Skin History Series investigates the idea of human skin as a map of personal individual history. Our skin is a historic "imprint" – unique and embedded with experiential information.We are all "marked" like a canvas.