ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Art at its most basic is fantastic play. It is a secret companion who accepts and explains and listens and encourages. It forms an alternate reality, a what if? It creates a tolerable world.

For the first seven years of my life, my reality was formed by my primary caregiver, my increasingly mentally ill father. While the mundane requirements of life were often ignored, fantasy was plentiful. I was an artistic child but my observation of the way mainstream society treats its outsiders created a deep desire to be considered "normal." A series of weirdly chaotic events finally persuaded me to embrace the strange and magical unknown. Once converted, I began to ask questions. I believed they were innocuous questions.

The French artist, Jean Dubuffet, championed the idea of l'art brut, artistic otherness. Roger Cardinal describes the practitioners of art brut as Outsiders who define themselves by what they are not. They reject "that force which feeds on blind obedience, fidelity to stereotypes, the denial of spontaneity, the repression of individualism and experimentation." I questioned the Academy because while I didn't know what kind of artist I was, I knew what I was not. I began asking people outside the art establishment for their ideas about art because they had no vested interest in the outcome. It never occurred to them that their answers might be foolish or wrong. They thought making art for me was absurd and funny. I watched them. We played.

I asked cops to make art and they did it. They questioned me skeptically, resisted and looked for my angle. I persuaded them with the offer of a picture of themselves in an alternate reality. We exchanged a guarded communication. The search for that communication is my constant companion. It permeates my work. For me it creates a tolerable world.

BIOGRAPHY

I am the daughter of two professional photographers, born in 1953, in Columbus, Ohio. My mother was sent, as a photographer, to Vietnam from 1965-66 by her employer, Battelle Memorial Institute, to do classified work for the U.S. Government. She was responsible for microfilming government documents related to the war's escalation. She returned in 1966, opposed to American involvement in the conflict; her experience influenced me to protest the war at an early age. In 1973, she died of breast cancer at age 42. Just days before her death, I was kidnapped by an escaped convict and used as a transportation hostage along with my boyfriend and another couple. He released us and within 5 minutes we flagged down the Cleveland police. They refused to take our report or search for him. The fugitive kidnapped and killed another girl. She was alone.

My father, a bookish WWII veteran, developed severe mental illness during my early childhood and abandoned our family. He set our house on fire. For many years he was homeless, living on the streets, and died unknown to us in a VA Hospital in 1994. My mother was a single mother, moving constantly from one crisis to another. The extreme chaos created by these melodramatic childhood events resulted in my being on my own, without family support at age 17, uncertain of my future. The idea of pursuing a life as an artist seemed quixotic.

In my early twenties, I worked fulltime and went to school. I left college in the last semester of a Business bachelor's degree when my job was eliminated. I was forced, for financial reasons, to relocate to accept a job in Boston. After working for a miserable year as a district manager for a retail chain with stores throughout New England, I abruptly married a man who was restoring an historic wooden sailboat. We moved to Florida to live aboard to finish the restoration and then sail the world. From 1979-83 we sailed extensively and prepared for our grand adventure. I had a son.

In January 1983, we departed Ft. Pierce, Florida fully provisioned to sail the first leg of the trip, to Grand Bahama. The boat sank that night in a storm just off West Palm Beach. We lost everything but our lives.

This financial loss and our divorce that followed shortly after left me as a single mother, without family, living in Central Florida. I worked a series of jobs: restaurant hostess, bookstore clerk, 4-color lithography territory sales rep, and scrambled for child support, day care and cheap housing. After several years, I was able to move to Gainesville, apply the specialized skills I had acquired in book management (antiquarian books, maps, and manuscripts) and go back to college to obtain an Art History degree. During the last semester of that degree, in 1991, I took a required Photography class and realized immediately it was what I had always wanted to do. For the last ten years, I have pursued several long-term photo projects and trained both academically and vocationally as an artist. I remarried and raised my son. From 1991-2001, I have worked on the LAPD project. It is the visual and philosophical expression of the experiences I've had in an interesting and challenging life.

METROPOLIS PHOTOS