All my life my work has looked like me. This collection of 3 dozen drawings were done from 1961 - 1968 when I was eleven to seventeen years old growing up in Smyrna, Georgia. Continuing sagas about brave, glamorous and enduring women were my favorite form of expression. My heroines were Brenda Starr, Supergirl, Jackie Kennedy and my mother. When I was fourteen, my mother died suddenly and these drawings became an even more important refuge for me. I escaped the unhappiness of that time by drawing girls in spaceships made from Easter egg foils, teenagers in Go-Go boots set to colonize Mars, and butterfly cloaked paperdolls who were poised for flight.

These drawings were first exhibited at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in June 2001 as the focus of their 2001 Biennial. The critic for the Atlanta Journal Constitution called them unusual and "the heart of the Biennial".

"Memories From Before I Was Born"

"Memories From Before I Was Born" is a narrative diorama depicting my parents' post World War II wedding in a rural Alabama farmhouse. Creating this installation has been pure joy! It allowed me to return to the cocoon of childhood memory and take my earliest learned skills (doll making of all sorts, hand sewing, mud pie making) and create a little world which is a paean to my mother who died when I was a young girl over 30 years ago. I don't think we need to be afraid of the sentimental as long as the proper ghosts accompany it. The companion audiotape in which my father, my mother's many sisters, and I (our similar voices are a scream) tell stories is a special reunion all its own. My parents' "union" becomes a "reunion" of celebrated memories recreated in an artwork that is itself an evocation of play.