ARTIST STATEMENT: I've always had a penchant for mythology, folktales, stories filtering down through the collective unconscious... There is an impression I receive from these stories (these fantastic explanations of the natural world, how things work and why, how they relate to a condition, tragically, comically; life, death!) that compels me to work, to struggle to capture and share the essence of a dream, a journey, or a connection; tales (and ways of telling) that are getting lost in the noise. I yearn for wildness. I harbor an inkling that the myth of human supremacy is just that; myth. I have a deep desire to obliterate the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being. I believe in art that exists in a space of gender fluidity, species equality. Art that creates an inexplicable understanding, dropping the barrier between creator and observer. The connection is visceral. Raw and messy and urgent, I paint with my fingers and body instead of a brush, make spontaneous etchings with bleeding ink and acid and thread, dirt and found objects, print monotypes with discarded plexiglass and cardboard, create masks and puppets and installations using almost entirely garbage, collected when possible from within a mile of the area in which I am working. My interdisciplinary performance work centers on the concept of movement before thought. Marrying subconscious narrative with mythic and folk impulses, science, history, social justice...feminism, environmentalism, resistance! To that end, I create ritual-inspired participatory performances centered on intuitive movement and pure emotion and rooted in the world of the misfit. In choosing to create moments that are site specific, re-purposing mundane scavenged objects, using urgent movement, mask, costume, I seek to create a dialogue about our place, about what immobilizes us, tangles us up, throws us forward, breaks us down. I like the surprises and the accidents, the failures and successes, the story, the connection.