Artist Statement

Everything can change in an instant. It only takes one moment, for a ship to get steered off course. One rouge wave, one treacherous storm at sea. Your site gets lost and everything turns to tumult.
My moment was unusually still, it was warm out like a heavy blanket in a breezeless evening, two days after summer solstice in 2019.

A searing blinding pain, when I lifted the handle of my car door just after dusk, my whole world changed: set adrift off course. The pain of hot knives stabbing me over and over again while simultaneously being electrocuted through every nerve of my body. Alarm bells ringing in my head trying not to panic as I could not catch a breath, blindsided from the excruciating pain. I managed to stumble into my friend’s home and collapsed on her kitchen floor begging her to call 911, still not knowing what was happening or the cause.
My friend looked at the inside of my left leg by my ankle, a set of two tiny pin pricks followed by another set of three. Snake bite she exclaimed, as the ambulance came to whiz me away to the ER. From there began my nightmare, and a tale of survival from a copperhead snake bite, the worst they had ever seen claimed the ER doctor.
Venom coursed through my blood vessels, bursting them open causing internal hemorrhaging, it also attacked my muscles causing those tissues to deteriorate and it destroyed my nerves along its path, a triple threat, hence the feelings of electrocution. Honestly, I just wanted to die that night and to be laid down like a lame horse. Anything to stop the extreme pain and the agony of watching my leg expand 4 times its size while my knee felt like it was clamped in a vice grip while someone continuously turned the screw. Pure torture while the doctors did nothing but give me some pain medication and monitored my vitals as the blackness continued up my leg through the night destroying everything in its wake. No anti venom given, no solace.

For others, their moment could be the horrifying call that a drunk driver killed their loved one. A cancer diagnosis, a ski accident causing a limb torn off to be replaced with titanium. A pounding on the door in the middle of the night, children crying in pajamas and parents in their nightclothes forced outside in the cold without dignity by masked men with guns in the name of DHS. The father torn away from his family and sent to a far off prison without a lawyer, or rights to speak of. Or a devastating hurricane floods your land, property and entire town turning your world upside down, never to be the same.

This is happening all in one moment. After that moment you can decide, “am I going to continue to suffer or will I, after this trauma passes, choose to be full of life again?” To see the joy in every moment, for now is all we have. Time is our most precious currency and it is not promised.

I choose to make art that celebrates the beauty of fleeting moments and in the mundane. Shadows cast across a church wall. The light an hour before sunset that casts its golden glow upon the land. Sparkles on a ripple of water in a lake. The texture and colors of the skin of an apple that makes it look like the surface of a distant planet.

We are all woven into this vast tapestry of life, and interconnected by its threads. My job in this moment is just to notice and behold its intrinsic beauty. I give great gratitude for this life and what is has to show me.