I
come from a long line of junk dealers. Growing up in the
Midwest near Cleveland, Ohio with no siblings my age,
I was often bored and drove my mother crazy. Whenever
I got to be too much, she would give me art materials
and tell me to "make something". I also relieved
my boredom on my own by collecting pictures of shrunken
heads and asking questions that no one could answer. I
loved scrounged materials like old wallpaper sample books
and old barn wood. On our yearly summer trip to Montana,
I would always come home with collected rocks, cacti and
and even colored sand and dirt.
While
I was still in high school, I opened a craft and "antique"
shop in the semi-ghost town of Pony, Montana with my mom.
We would dig up old bottles, rusty pans, and chamber pots
at the town dump, then sell them to tourists along with
all manner of arts and crafts we made over the long winter
in Ohio. When I was a teen we went to visit (for the first
and only time) my maternal grandfather in Oklahoma. He
was a Montana horse trader before he moved to Ardmore
to open a junk shop.
After
a early career as a studio potter, then a ceramic sculptor,
college teacher and instructional designer in the Denver-Boulder
area, I moved out of the city to the mountains of south-central
Colorado. Here I have easy and plentiful access to old
junk, antiques and oddities for my found object assemblage
sculpture.
My
studio sits along the Arkansas River near Salida, Colorado
where I live with my husband, writer Ron Sering and my
Jack Russell Terrier, Molly Brown, who is ever eager to
help me spot animal bones and dig up old bottles.
