I wrote the below Artist Statement and published this website when I was 21, an art student at UCSC, spending long nights in a dark studio with a crew of hungry young artists in oil paint stained clothing. Sometimes I’d get home at 4am, sleep for a few hours and then jump on the next bus to be back up on campus for 8am class. My eyes were dark, my hair was falling out, and I was subsisting on a diet of Snickers bars from a nearby candy dispenser. So if the words below were written in a frenzy please forgive me, they were an attempt to convey my world of inspiration:

I am a collector. I collect bottle-caps, action figures, rocks, shells, shoes, t-shirts, wrappers, notes from friends, skateboard decks, paint pens, comic books, furniture, plants, sports cards, power tools, marbles, and memories of favorite soups. But mainly... I love junk. A shiny broken earring that looks like Aquarius, a tiny pencil, a strip of rubber- I love it all! My parents did not, my roommate does not, but my boyfriend is intrigued!

Do you know why I do it? I mean do you really want to know the reason to all the madness? I love to line up all the analogous things together and amaze at their similarities and differences. Visual crack. My bedroom is like a museum that three tornados waltzed through on a sunny day. There are ambiguously shaped islands of carpet that I sometimes get glimpses of when I go panning for my wallet. I sift through children's books, and art projects, and mismatched pillows with every superhero who ever flew out of the TV on them. I love it all! When I get bored I go digging and find forgotten visual stimulation that works like new again. I lose my wallet at least twice a week, I lose my cell phone just as commonly, and everything else that I own might as well be considered lost.

So here is the deal, yesterday I told my drawing teacher that I have been paralyzed by a ray gun, the pebbles in my cat’s eyes, as well as the junk yard that I live in. Two different colored stripes on a pair of sport socks can grab my unbalanced vision and hold me for long periods of time. I told her about how, “I just learned that there are people who dream in black and white. I told a friend and he said, ‘Well you probably don’t dream in color, you just add colors when you wake up.’ I will only respond to this friend’s statement with a gravy drowned turkey legged, “HA!”

May 2007