about the artist
Biography: "A Work In Progress"
After graduating college with a degree in mathematics, I became one of the computer industry’s early programmers. A successful career as a systems analyst and technical writer, combined with marriage and raising two children left little time for other creative outlets. Even so, at night I was usually using my hands, working on a sewing project or knitting and crochet.
After an illness and a long recovery, I started quilting, first bed quilts, then embellished 3D art quilts. I left the business world to pursue a life of art making.
For the last 40 years, I have been a self-taught studio fiber artist in northeast New Jersey. My creations are fiber sculptures and installations combining various fiber techniques with mixed media, including wood, wire, metal and found objects. Felt making and stitching are both slow, rhythmic, repetitive actions. Building solid armatures and working with power tools uses a different set of skills. Varying these activities gives me a balanced studio life.
I work in a series, using some aspect of nature to examine a life issue that has deep meaning to me. A series allows me to deepen the experience and can take a few years to complete. I experiment, change directions, work intuitively, and don’t like to repeat myself. The work is evolving, always changing---like me, a work in progress.
work/statement
Over the past years, artwork and process has been featured in several books, including How We Felt and 500 Felt Objects, as well as magazines, including Felt Matters, March 2026, the magazine of the International Felt Makers Association.
My art has been exhibited in museums, including the Montclair Museum, the Newark Museum, the Hunterdon Art Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, the Monmouth Museum and the Kent State University Art Museum.
Pieces have appeared in dozens of juried and invitational group and solo shows in galleries throughout the country, as well as held in private and corporate collections.
Although I have suspended group and private teaching, I spent many years teaching all levels of felt making in my home studio and Peter’s Valley School of Craft in the Delaware Water Gap.
My work is an expression of who I am and where my life is moving. Working alone in my studio, whether I am making felt, sewing, writing, building, or simply organizing my supplies, I can feel a slowing down, a relief, the peace of escaping the frantic turbulence of the outside world. It is quiet. My breath slows down. I focus better. Time passes and I get lost in my process. The ideas flow, the work changes. Something new begins to take shape. I need this time and place for my sanity.