During the 1970s, while taking studio art classes at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I found that I particularly liked screen printing. The challenges of seeing and working in layers, while combining my drawings and photographs to form an image appealed to me. The seemingly limitless possibilities layers present is what has guided my work through the years. It was through screen printing that I started taking photographs to use as objects in my prints as well as to serve as stencils.

To further my knowledge of photography I took classes at The Art School, in Carrboro, North Carolina. While learning the basics of photography there, the emphasis was on the importance of experimentation, not only while taking photographs, but also while working in the darkroom.

In the early 1980’s I moved to Rochester, NY and studied at the Visual Studies Workshop, concentrating on video studies. I greatly appreciated that there was very little about “this is how you do it,” but rather, “what do you want to say?” After a few years I was asked to teach video classes at the Visual Studies Workshop and later also taught video classes at the University of Rochester.

While living in New York State, I was fortunate to have residencies to study and work at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY. During these residencies I learned to collage video images from multiple video tapes I had taken while traveling in China. Freezing the collaged images made it possible to use them as still photographs and make them into stencils for screen printing.

Since moving to New Mexico in 1998 I have been creating all of my images with digital cameras. My current work, “Urban Reflections,” is the result of taking and processing photographs that look through layers of reflections. The interplay between the objects on which the reflections occur and the reflected objects, (for example, several reflections on cars) illustrate this phenomenon. These photographs echo the seeing and working in layers as in screen printing.