I am a fiber artist and printmaker originally from North Dakota, now based in Minneapolis, MN. My work is made up of recognizable imagery in the form of intricate etchings on handmade papers, successively collaged with fine printmaking papers and punctuated by hand-embroidery.  The etchings themselves are intimate studies of individual animals.  I explore not the textbook form of the species, but rather the expressions conveyed by their organic movements captured in a still, illustrated moment of individual personality.  The images are small. Their size dictated by the etched substrate – discarded retail gift cards.  All the better though, to get up-close and personal with the sometimes mammoth beasts that I portraitize. At times the work has a hint of storytelling with the use of my intaglio images as pseudo-illustrations for a kind of narrative when paired with code-like paragraph shapes formed from the hand-embroidery.  My continual hand-stitched marks were born out of inspiration from my childhood in North Dakota. The landscape in the North Dakota plains is a never-ending steady horizon.  In such an environment one learns to find excitement and inquiry in the slightest variation.  For many months of the year the landscape is frozen -- the only interruption to low snow drifts being the regular linear patterns of the surrounding farmland. 

Though fiber is not typically a minimalist medium, my work emulates this peaceful beauty in its monotony while also a conveying calmness through repetition.  And yet, since the sewing is by hand, the intrinsic variations in the stitches give evidence of humanity.

This is one reason I stitch by hand, using needle and thread – not by machine.