Remnants of personal stories, visions, and observations in nature are the driving forces in my work.  For almost 40 years the sinewy crepe myrtle tree has become my primary material and metaphor — a way to speak about the Texas landscape, cycles of death and renewal, beauty, and our growing environmental concerns.  My process is slow and rooted in place:  collecting fallen trees by the side of the road, spending long hours weaving their linear forms into new structures, and allowing time to shape the relationship I build with these materials.  It is these materials from the Earth — wood, stone, metal, fire — that are the elements that charge my thoughts and imbue the work with a kind of personal spirituality.  My reverence for nature and working with natural materials evokes the life cycles of the natural world.

Drawing, printmaking, sculpture — all are threads of the same gesture.  Making a mark on a page is similar to constructing a sculpture, one stick at a time.  A sketchbook often initiates conceptual frameworks, while sculptural works extend those gestures into three-dimensional space.  My studio, filled with trees, feels like entering a forest:  a space of truth, possibility, and quiet observation.  At times I make a sculpture in wood with the sole purpose of burning it out to cast in bronze.  Bronze has another kind of beauty all to itself, allowing me to preserve fragile extensions of tiny myrtle sticks that would otherwise fracture like a bone.  My early study as a weaver continues in these works, whether in the delicate lines of a bronze spider’s web or in the whittled facets carved by hand into each stick.  The repetitive motion of carving, pegging, and assembling countless lines is a meditation that anchors my practice.

Across media, my work is unified by an exploration of line as fundamental structure — whether drawn on paper, carved in wood or cast in bronze.  Each piece reflects an engagement with nature’s cycles and embodies a dialogue between fragility and permanence.  Every story begins with a line from nature. The work is, at its core, nature as meditation.