Familiars (2008) are wooden kitchen and sewing implements that have been covered with a polymer doll maker's clay that has properties of both flesh and stone.  The objects manifest  feminine figures designed to be grasped or touched; they are also aged as a result of surface crazing from accidents during the curing stage.   Part tools, part playthings, they are the familiars and the relics of a scarcely remembered domestic past.   

Tools for Today (2008) refer to household helpmates ranging in scale from paintbrush to push broom.  The tools are transformed by coiffures created from synthetic or human hair, and pose as interventions between domesticity and labor, feminine personality and portraiture, duty and pleasure.

Kid Gloves (2005-2007) resulted from having acquired a collection of ladies’ leather gloves. The gloves suggest, to me, preoccupations with revealing or containing the feminine form, and escape through role playing and costume. They are altered, hand sewn, fitted with skeletal wire armatures, and stuffed with sawdust to become discrete objects. Some of them incorporate doll parts or doll making techniques. In un-making them, I think of women’s traditions of handwork, particularly in long hours of sewing, but they are also reminiscent of doll-things or toys in animated states of dress and undress.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1991-1995) is the title of a series of small sculptures constructed from a collection of tobacco pipes. I was influenced by readings on the Surrealist movement, and specifically by the paradox of Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images.” The titles were in ungoverned French, a language in which I was once fluent enough to dream, but in which I am now barely conversant. Tobacco pipes and my forgotten French fascinated me as anachronisms in the worlds of objects and language. I was thinking about the interdependence of image and language, "figures of speech," and with contradicting the tobacco pipe as an epitome of functional form.