Flyover (John Lewis Memorial Bridge, Northgate, Seattle)

crayon and ink on canvas, 14 x11 IN, 2026

Spatial relationships continue to challenge me. The monumental piers of the John Lewis Bridge (where I catch the Light Rail to travel downtown to CoCA) exude a hypnotic effect, especially as night gathers on the small trees and groundcover in the surrounding superhighway landscaping.

Whether writing poems, making sculpture, or painting, I tend to excavate surfaces, sifting materiality for traces of underlying abstraction and meaning. If there is gold in this ore, it is only through endurance and persistence that I am occasionally lucky enough to discover a small fragment worth sharing with others. I am struck by the paradox of making art in a late Capitalist system where nothing is outside the marketplace: it barely seems possible to have a practice without websites or art-spam on social media. Still, I maintain a CoCA Directory Profile and enjoy being a part of the annual member's exhibition.

After finishing PhD and MFA degrees (U of Washington), I taught in Poland and Hungary on several Fulbright grants before joining Cornish College of the Arts from 1999 – 2006. When my kids were old enough, I rejoined the workforce as a curator at Museum of Glass and public art coordinator at City of Shoreline. My poems have appeared in Verse, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, New Orleans Review and others, while my visual work was shown at Bellevue Arts Museum, CoCA, Anne Focke Gallery, and others. In 2019 I taught a summer class on creative practice at Tsinghua U in Beijing.