In February 2005, I started making collages as part of an art residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. I have continued making collages—a direction far removed from my primary performance practice of the last seventeen years—which has become my primary artistic focus.

My visual work is in some ways an extension of my performance work. In my performances I borrowed and re-configured found text into ambiguous narratives about longing and desire. My collages continue to explore many of these same ambiguous narrative strategies. I’m also interested in visual hybrids such as human and animal interspecies and the recombination of the symbolic strategies from the western art canon.

Visually I respond to the operatic shimmer, sparkle and complexity—the grandly narrated spectacle—of life. My background in anthropology and art history informs how I construct these collages. I’m tethered to the possible story within the fragment. I play with symbols and metaphors from art history, language, and religion to create new images that are strongly representational, with an attention to precise cutting and visual consistency, a nod toward absurd, implied narrative