Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, olsd rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
—W.B. Yeats
The Circus Animals’ Desertion [excerpt]

As much as the idea of order transformed from chaos excited me as a literature student,
it was actually the force of chaos that had most of my interest.

When Allen Ginsberg wrote in Howl of the Sunflower, “You never were no locomotive,
Sunflower, you were a sunflower!”
I was rooting for the locomotive, crazy for his hypnotic images
of “black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded,
the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless,
only the dank muck and the razor sharp artifacts passing into the past—.”
These were the images that resonated for me. It was the rusted out tin can that grabbed me.

So, looking back, it is no surprise that eventually I would sweep the streets, trolley tracks
and the back of gas stations looking for discarded rusted metal, twisted branches,
stones, or any other eye-catching, compelling piece of debris.
To me they looked like treasure, even like the implements or adornments of ritual.

And all these found their way into my sculpture—but not until the violent death of
a young cousin in Somalia, a victim of the chaos in Mogadishu.
After I heard, I saw differently. A veil was lifted. And I shifted my work from
pencil, ink and paint to clay. Forms came spontaneously and quickly
from a core I had never reached before.

From that time on, clay has taken shape for me immediately and passionately,
as from some collective unconscious. Whatever stuff I pick up:
metal, rocks, twine, wood, is consumed by a series of figures.

I now find myself going through promising dumpsters from Boston to
Barcelona looking for treasures, scanning trolley tracks for whatever has fallen off
the trolley. The breakdown of my car becomes cause of celebration as I am handed
a new piece of metal to animate my work.

I gather roots and branches ripped from trees by storms; rocks shattered by
machinery, spit up chiseled by volcanic eruptions or washed smooth by seas from
Maine to Helsinki.

My figures, often female, stand as guardian figures giving voice and power to the voiceless.
Alone or in chorus as in the installations,
The Dream of the Inner Voice: Bearing Witness and in the installation, Phalanx of the Long-Necked Women,
they chant, speak out, bear witness.
They attest to what they have seen,
give testimony to what they feel, to what they know.

In the studio, I push and pierce the found materials into the clay and mold clay
around them. Objects and clay interact: as the object transforms the figure, the
object is itself transformed. Refuse is reborn.

I use clay that hardens at 250° F, enabling found objects to be worked into my pieces from their inception. My
figures emerge in one long sitting—whole but not finished. After hardening, the figures are variously sanded,
carved, polished, reconfigured (for example, some of the metal, stone, or wood is eventually removed, imprints
revealed) over a period of weeks or months, until I know in my bones that the piece has taken on a life of its own,
a new figure of an old soul.