The middle of nowhere is just down the road in my sparsely populated western state. There’s not nothing out here — in fact there’s a lot of something! Sky, grass, wildlife, crops, cattle, badlands, mountains, sagebrush, wildflowers, colors, shapes, textures, industry, highways, dirt roads, hiking trails, public lands, campgrounds. All provide stimulation and inspiration for my work.

I’m influenced by land art and have visited several sites, yet I have no desire to scar the land any more than we already have. As we extract resources from the earth and capture sun and wind to power our homes, cars, and gadgets, we leave scars. My aim is to create installations that leave little trace as to their presence.

The middle of nowhere is also a state of mind. I’ve been in an urban center and felt the same sense of solitude I have in the vast prairie. The middle of nowhere has also manifest itself in me as a deep loneliness, regardless of the geographic location.

While growing up in rural southeastern Colorado my family took many road trips, either for a day or for weeks, around the West. We explored and found all sorts of interesting things with fascinating shapes and histories unknown. I grew to love the vast wide-open spaces and skies, along with the treasures to be found on the ground and the ancient and contemporary stories lived out around the area.  Driving back and forth from my Colorado home to college at the University of Kansas, I spent hours on the long stretches of land and sky gazing at the clouds, the fields, the colors and the seemingly endless line of highway in front of me.

After living in the South and along the East Coast for a decade while my husband served in the USMC, we longed for the open space of the West again and landed back in Colorado for a time, then moved north to Wyoming in 2001.

After years of creating art driven to produce a final product (paintings, drawings, functional clay pieces, coiled basketry and vessels), I came to a fork in the road of my artistic journey. The questions “What compels me to create? Is it the final product or the process?” kept haunting my thoughts. Process won the argument over product, but what to do with decades of work and accomplishments? Dispose of all the experience and technique? What now?

Instead of the fork in the road requiring a hard turn, it turned out to be a gradual curve that circled back to ideas I had years prior. A pilgrimage to the Spiral Jetty with my husband and daughter, studying land and environmental artists, and reflections on the land and environmental issues facing us here in the West inspired me to focus on a process that quenched my creative thirst yet was not directed toward creating consumer products.

Now I create objects in my studio using whatever materials I can find to make the thing that is in my imagination. Placed in the environment, these objects are not meant to be seen and experienced by an audience, but are intimate ephemeral works that I capture with a photo and geographic coordinates. I share my experience with viewers through this website, and as projections and small prints in exhibits.

If you like my photos and art, feel free to share, but please give me credit and link to this site. Don’t use them for commercial gain or modify them. Thanks!