The outer story: I am an artist, strategist, marketer/consultant, and certified coach. The inner story is what follows.

My earliest memories are of living on a lake in upstate New York — mossy woods, clear water, and fields that began where our yard ended and infinity began. I was five, and I did not visit these spaces so much as belong to them. I would dangle my toes from the dock and wait for my fish friends to rise and greet me. I believed we were in kinship. What some may call magical thinking, I now understand as something older and truer: that we are deeply, inextricably woven into the world we inhabit. We have simply forgotten. My work is about remembering.

I grew up the youngest of five, and my beloved mother was the first to introduce me to the magic of making — from beeswax candles to jam made with berries picked in the fields beside our house.

In kindergarten, my teacher Carol Barrows filled a room with light. She didn't teach so much as initiate — drawing us into experience: painting, dancing, singing, tending living things. She understood that the body knows what the mind is still reaching for. I still orient from this foundation.

Later, in a university classroom, Dr. David Carrasco opened another kind of door. His teaching on the sacred dimensions of human experience — the way ritual, symbol, and cosmology make meaning across cultures and centuries — named something I had felt but could not yet speak. That the world is not merely material. That the ordinary is threaded through with the holy. His words landed like recognition. They still do.

In art school, my peers called my work delightfully weird. I took that in and recognized something important: my creative voice was distinct, and the art was teaching me as I made it. A willingness to surrender to process, to follow what wanted to emerge, created a shift in others. If my work creates a moment of awareness, a feeling, a small opening in someone's experience, I consider it valuable.

Like many, I've carried some weight from childhood — experiences I had no language for until much later. I have learned to understand my heightened sensitivity for what it inherently is: a gift. My early experiences laid a foundation of visual acuity. They help me attune to what others are feeling, and what I am feeling. In my work, this shows up as a willingness to look slowly, to witness carefully, to honor what is fragile and sacred in all of us and the world we inhabit, and to play in those spaces between the seen and unseen.

I work in sculpture, photography, drawing, and illustration. Sculpture is my soul place, where I feel most anchored — where I listen for what materials want to become and participate in that becoming. The forms that emerge are an alchemy of my life experience forged with the tactile, natural motifs that enchanted me as a child. Photography and drawing are meditations. Illustration is joy and delight.

The undercurrent of my life is a belief that we are, at our foundation, connected — to one another, to the earth, to something sacred that moves through all living things. For me, the closest word for that undercurrent is love. My work is an invitation to feel the kinship that is waiting beneath the surface of ordinary life.

In the end, if love is my legacy, I will have lived a meaningful life.