About

Memory is a story we tell ourselves. When details fade or become unclear, we fill in the blanks and tell a new story. Looking to the past, we become alive in the present, feel memory as part of our bodies.

I draw on landscapes of memory and story from my childhood as an identical twin, from an adulthood as a migrant. As fat little girls in Ohio my twin sister and I shared a symbiotic creative relationship, refuge from a judgemental 1970’s world. Against the odds, we transformed ourselves one summer losing 45lbs. Unrecognizable, a cause-celebre, the shock of our success brought a deep ambivalence, and a yearning for our lost secret world. The echo of this longing remains in my imagination.

Having left the US and lived in Scotland for many years I cope with nostalgia by believing in parallel universes where all possibilities might exist. Paint, found materials, ruined landscapes are entry points to stories of possibility and promise, confusion and failure – remnants of a long lost American dream.

Working outdoors feels like an embodied memory. Responding to the light and movement in nature, in shattered buildings, is a meditation on being present in time.

Painting resonates with transformative possibilities. As in the story of the ugly duckling, it mirrors the ancient dream of transforming base material into something beautiful and enduring.