“Creating is soulful work; Meaningful, beautiful, essential work. What could be more powerful than the intuitive act of Creation itself?”
I'm a natural storyteller drawn to the imperfect, the quirky, the artsy, the funky and the authentic, be it people or objects or art.
As a mixed-media artist for 25+ years, I find stunning beauty in asymmetry, raw edges, chippy paint and deep cracks that are barely holding an object together.
I scour flea markets, tag sales, antqiue shops and art markets for vintage ephemera, grandmother doilies, bits of tattered lace, architectural salvage, authentic patina, broken costume jewelry, miniature light bulbs, chandelier crystals. Frozen Charlotte dolls and even tiny doll arms and legs get collected, re-imagined and repurposed into art.
I have a studio (and a shed and a guest room closet) filled with literal odds and ends, and I've never once run out of stories to tell or pieces to make with them.
Like all artists, I love color, texture and good solid design. I also love things that are different and push the envelope. I can’t imagine attempting to match anything in my home to a sofa or walls.
I wake up each morning as though my life is a blank canvas and then I decide over coffee what I want to paint on it that day. It keeps things interesting!
See some of my original work below - paintings & collage, mixed-media jewelry, handmade journals & tags, assemblages & murals
I've been an instructor for most of my career, teaching at and/or running week-long national and international retreats and private group weekends.
I wrote two jewelry books and have been published in dozens of magazines, including writing monthly mixed-media columns for Belle Armoire Jewelry and Cloth, Paper, Scissors for about five years running. Plus frequent contributions to the Stampington & Company family of magazines.
I also wrote a monthly column called Paper, Scissor, Crop for Mary Englebreit’s Home Companion magazine. All of this was in the mid-2000s, back when makers faithfully bought subscriptions and cleared a whole day to read them when they arrived in our physical mailboxes.
I filmed instructional DVDs with Cloth, Paper, Scissors before virtual learning was a real thing, and made guest appearances on Make it Artsy, Craft Room Crash and local morning shows. These days my virtual courses live with Create Arts Online.
In November 2023 I self-published the Joy FULL Oracle Card Deck for Creatives, Healers and Feelers, which I sell directly and through small independent booksellers.
All of this to say I've been in the mixed-media industry a long while now, and I've seen and weathered a lot of changes in art, business and teaching.
Yes, I've grown, changed, morphed and pivoted over the years, and my core vision has only gotten stronger. I believe art is a beautiful subset of creativity.
Creativity is something all human beings are born with and our collective desire is to create form from ether. To look at raw materials such as steel, wood, clay, metal, cloth, etc. and see in our mind's eye a vision of what they'll become is precisely what makes us beautifully human.
Creativity, however, isn't only what happens when we sit at a work table. It's the problems we solve by thinking outside the box and improvising, the way a chef arranges a meal on a plate, the way some people write poetry, the dancing we do alone in our homes when spirit moves through music, as well as a myriad of other things we all do as part of daily living. My favorite creative expressions are all the ways we humans find to connect through beauty and love.
People expressing life is creativity. Doing it masterfully is art.
Mix in a heaping dose of intuition and energy and you'll see my essence. Art & Spirit runs through everything I do.
