Sisters

• DateNovember 25, 2016

This summer I made a trip to the east coast. I had not been there in over ten years.  It felt both strange and familiar.  Things have changed a lot in my hometown of Avalon, New Jersey. Ninety percent of the little beach bungalows are gone, replaced by multimillion dollar homes with landscaping. We never had landscaping when I lived there as a child. Instead, our lawns consisted of large swaths of stone.  No watering, no mowing, just weeding, my least favorite activity back then. My four sisters and I constantly wrangled over whose turn it was to weed on chore-day and somehow it always fell on me, or at least it felt that way. As you might imagine, growing up in a household of six women (not a lot of male influence in my childhood home) was emotionally and physically charged. We shared a couple of bathrooms and a lot of conversations.

Every fall we did our “back to school” shopping together, a family ritual. I was the sister to provide the all-too honest answers to the “How does this outfit make me look?” question on countless shopping trips—truth being a major prerequisite for aspiring artists and lawyers alike, both of which defined me at the time. My sisters did not take too kindly to my responses. They wanted reassurance. They wanted help building up their confidence as we all moved through adolescence. So I eventually learned to temper my answers a bit. But knowing my sisters as well as I did, and living through our struggle to build confidence despite inner misgivings, had an impact on me that I had not appreciated until I started sculpting female forms.

The voices of these women from my early life have stayed with me, and they inform the character of the “ladies” that populate my work.  Their sense of beauty and of self, of style and of endurance, are all equally present in my ceramic sculptures that explore outside perceptions of the body, internal body image, and what happens to visual perception when external and internal points of view confront one another and overlap.