I am a painter and papermaker with a background in ceramics. I was raised in the Connecticut River Valley in western Massachusetts. My parents taught me about horticulture and plant biology from a young age, and led me by example to respect plants’ ingenuity, beauty, and potent healing properties. 

As a teenager I had the opportunity to spend time in New York with a mentor/friend who took me under her wing and introduced me to modern painting and contemporary ceramics at museums like the MoMA, the Whitney, and Dia Beacon. Those museum visits sparked in me a deep appreciation for the visual language of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, the influence of which still reflects in my work today. 

Throughout my twenties I worked as a cook and a baker full time to support myself while making and selling pottery on the side. I also traveled quite a bit with my husband at the time whom I palled around with with wherever our whims and humble paychecks could get us. We spent a summer hitchhiking through Alaska to the Kenai Peninsula where we stayed in an old homesteading cabin in exchange for tending to that property owner’s vegetable farm. We traveled to western Ireland where we walked paths along the coast and listened to trad music every night and felt the aching loss and belonging of our ancestry in our bones and in the soil. 

Since going back to school in 2020 I have been working primarily in drawing and painting. In recent years I have become increasingly interested in engaging with the substrates that I apply painting mediums to just as much as I am interested in engaging with the surface layer(s) of my paintings. This has led me to papermaking using plant materials that I harvest and process myself.