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Fingers too, (like eyes) are ganglia of the brain, nodes on the loop of thinking, hands-on driving a Hoop-of-Mind. They are a loom.
A confluence of mindful practice and wholeness describes my ideal experience of making art. It can occur if I am watchful in meeting my subject, and open in my responses to what I learn. Then, work receiving honor from my subject and through it, intimacy with the World. This is the feeling of being near to God when the Self is lost in creative work.

I grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa in a house designed for my parents by Frank Lloyd Wright-surely an imprinting experience on a mid-century, Midwestern childhood. Just as important to my artistic beginnings were a home life rich in free time, outdoor space and materials from the creek bed and surrounding woods. In summer, there was arts camp with sunrise yoga, professional dance intensives, and later, South Bear School for the Arts near Decorah, Iowa, where Joseph Langland compassed body, landscape, song and memory in teaching the making of poems.

These experiences found shape and discipline at the University in Iowa City, with majors in Art and English, an Honors Exhibition in Printmaking and placement in Iowa Writers Workshop Undergraduate classes. An MA followed from Iowa's Printmaking Department, with Mauricio Lasansky and Keith Achepohl baiting, enlightening and teaching students.

The 80’s brought work as itinerate college professor, gallery director and curator; successful fine press wood engraver (Manhattan, poems by Amy Clampitt, 1990); and exhibiting oil painter. The decade was productive, though decidedly not gainful. So once more I matriculated-this time at University of Wisconsin, where, supported on wings of the Graduate School, I enjoyed a provocative knuckling-down with Walter Hamady in the Book Arts/Letterpress Lab. I left Madison with food in my belly and MFA in hand.

My next prospect, a short-term teaching job in Pennsylvania, converted unexpectedly to an expanded package in the person of Pete, Guru of Spheres Binary, friend and husband. Together, we migrated to Greeley, Colorado, where I headed Printmaking and Book Arts at University of Northern Colorado from 1993-2001; and where our daughter, Svetlana, came into being. Today we live in Greeley and thrive, a little family of broad leanings.

Notes on my tapestries • Technique and craft form a language of technical and structural operations that is integrated, selective and specific; for me, it must also be improvisational, resilient and personal-play subverts economy • Materials have Voice that carries information, both for the senses and of the culture (meanings). Tensions of Voice "ithin a weaving can excite curiosity, suggest narrative, and express the conditions of their making .• Interplay of line and space takes on energy when articulated via the structural nature of tapestry. The action of an independent line of color on a field can be drawn as a directional thread within a bedding of weave. Or generally, the character of tensions between action/event and surface is defined by medium .• Works of intimate scale own certain vitality-especially when taken together with the experience of holding an object in one's hand .• The dynamics of rectilinear geometry are inexhaustible: think of the generative potential of a folded-down sheet of paper, as for a printer's octavo ....• Structure and light within the architecture of weaving can act like a paradox known to teachers of graphics. The layout grid of a news magazine is surprising; it is neither functionally spare, nor reductively elegant. Rather, it looks like the mesh of a window screen-soft-focus, low contrast and neutral in tone. If light were poured over the screen, the effect would be fluid and shadowy; if the screen reflected color, it would look painterly. Now the grid, in extremis, arrives at its own undoing ... or its ultimate perfection-the formidable Grid is a rigging of light.