My studio is full of curiosity about navigation and looking at the ways we find ourselves in place or space, or displacement and re-placement. I am a multi-media artist who migrated permanently to Suffolk from Chicago in 2017. I studied art the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA -91, MFA -99). I have exhibited internationally for over 30 years with my most recent solo exhibition at the project space 142 Gallery in Felixstowe where I invited visitors to be part of a collaborative map. We had great fun! In my studio you’ll see my current work but also my walls filled with paintings, drawings, handmade jewellery, prints. I am located on a quiet road near the beautiful village of Kersey with its fantastic pub and equally close to the charming Boxford with another perfect spot to stop in. It is surely worth the trip here with my studio treats and our garden a place to enjoy a summer moment in Suffolk.
I first navigated to this part of the world more than 40 years ago though my path to returning here, where I felt was home, was been a circuitous one, full of longing. It is not surprising that my work suggests that many paths or routes are simultaneously possible and that different paths might have different outcomes. In that, I join in our human propensity towards making maps or records of journeys and in documenting those journeys with data in order to verify and to share our individual experience of navigating from a beginning to a culmination. I think about how we respond to the unexpected territories we arrive in, and to the inner reorganization that is necessary to adapt while moving and migrating.
It became clear to me some while ago that my work, while appearing abstract, in its essence, relates to how I see and experience the physical world I am newly navigating in rural Suffolk. The place where I have landed is full of winding little roads, rivers and valleys which are beautifully expressed in the contour lines of ordinance surveys I now use to find the myriad shared public thoroughfares.
Though I can’t see it, I sense that I am never far from the sea. In driving, the roundabouts that are central to driving in and out of any village, town or city are for me a radically different means of organizing routes, while at night the position of stars are inherently different from my inner sense of where they always were. Coming from a midwestern American city which was built on a rigid grid of roads with addresses indicating north and south, I continue in Suffolk to be challenged in knowing where north is. Inevitably I rely on an inner sense that true north is an interior state while relying fundamentally on where the sun sets to know where basic directions lie in relationship to where I live now. And just like all of our ancestors, I still rely on these very basic ways of navigating to learn about my location both physically and in less tangible ways. In my work I suggest that we all find our way through the world via these felt-sense routes and that once we understand how to get from one place to another, we tend to make maps so that we might show others a way too.
