A commitment to a sense of place – primarily the landscape – has always been a part of my sculpture and painting. My earlier interests in painterly texture, spatial depths and slices of space further developed into wall mounted reliefs. Prior to leaving for New York in 1979, I allowed these works to become more dimensional and off the wall as opposed to painted canvases. In formal terms, these “geoscapes” fused painting, sculpture and drawing; the works’ meaning derived from natural geological divisions on the land.

In New York City in the eighties, I continued my sculptural interests but with a renewed interest in man on the land. I produced works with various combinations and fragments of animal, landscape, and architectural images, often in a tableau format. These allegories were characterized by a strong sense of narrative time sensed through the expansive space of the installations, elementary form and color, and silent movement. Some installations deepened and mystified the space through reflective surfaces such as large pools of actual water, metal, glass and mirrors, and through elaborate architectural structures. Various works commented on the physical exhaustion of natural resources through man’s manipulations (chemical pollution, cloning, and governmental exploitation). While these works primarily focused on the animal as a surrogate or a device to recall human attitudes and behavior, I also combined human and animal forms.

Back in the Northwest in the nineties, I continued to be involved with themes of environmental exploitation, such as exhaustion of our national park system and political propaganda. I also began to refocus on the bird as an image. In the eighties I used birds as the cautionary messenger and sentry for public apathy and greed. In the nineties the visual element of color came to the foreground when I became interested in the extinction of songbirds. I was alarmed that estimates from Cornell University and Duke University stated that since 1960 we have lost approximately seventy-five percent of our songbird populations.