Makers in my family go back generations — mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. They tatted, sewed, knitted, crocheted, baked and cooked. There was always making, and domestic ritual around the making; meals, garments, table linens, among other things. My mother baking is the first material process I found moving and inspirational. Each year she baked taiglach, a Jewish dessert made with honey caramel. It is shiny and burning hot when it comes out of the pot, and she spread it with her hands that she had dipped in ice water first. It was a dramatic and dangerous act to me as a child and gorgeous in color and sheen. It reminds me now of the painting glazes I use. She also rolled rugelach from dough triangles into spirals. It was magical to me to watch raw materials like butter and flour turn into little works of art that all bore the print of the maker. Later in life, I worked in restaurants as a baker to support my art career. In addition, my father was a photographer and built his own darkroom in our basement. He taught me how to take photographs and develop them myself.
My family visited the boardwalk often. The candy makers awed me —fudge spread thick on its enormous marble slab, the taffy makers stretching huge columns of striped taffy, the cotton candy machine that swirled up an enormous cloud of hot pink candy on a paper cone. I also remember my mother’s and grandmother’s hairdressers teasing their hair into huge, sculptural beehives in the sixties, and then dousing them with hairspray. My grandmother in particular drew on her lips with bright red lipstick because her lips were thin. She didn’t hide the fact that she did this; watching her taught me that you could reinvent yourself with art, change an underlying shape by drawing over it. Equally instructive was that my family saw through her deception and found great humor in it. Later it spoke to me about intention: once the work is finished, it’s not in the artist’s control how it is perceived.
I am concerned about the way that women’s work is undervalued and invisible in our culture, and this mostly drives my choice of the small, intimate moment as subject matter. I’m interested in things that have a long thread into the past, including the history of food and the home. There are powerful metaphors and meaning inherent in domestic activity that fascinate me and inform my art: daily ritual and its sacred space, the collective memory of generations, nurturing both physical and emotional, the body’s connection to the earth, and the mapping and measuring of time by the everyday things that endure.