I see the world as if portents and signs are everywhere. There are no borders between religion, ritual, art and everyday life.

A friend once asked me how a “thinking person” could spend so much time studying the Tarot.

My response was that Tarot covered my love of history, spirituality, the unknown, as well as art, psychology, and more. He said he couldn’t believe in magic.

I looked around us, from the porch where we were sitting. There were some homeless people passing a bottle back and forth and laughing. Another shuffled by, mumbling to an imaginary listener. The night sky was just beginning to turn day into dark.

Can’t you see it? I asked my friend. Magic is everywhere! Perhaps it was the first time he had seen the sky with his soul’s eye.

Everyday life is where we find the madness and the victory, the insane and the obscene, the glorious and the tender, the beautiful and the pathetic. The human epic is a tangled mess of gorgeous dizzying splendor and squalid horrors. I can’t turn my eyes away from the beauty, and all the places I find it: colour, sparkles, textures, shapes. At the same time, I am also fascinated by the dark realm of the human imagination.

Religion has always been a human way of confronting
and controlling the spheres of dark and light, good and evil.
We are still a religious society in North America- but in our modern anthropology, mass culture has replaced mass. Celebrity and cash have become our surrogate spirituality, and consumerism fills us with the trinkets we need to worship. We are in many ways emotionally and
spiritually bankrupt, and we seek to fill those central
spaces by creating our own pantheon of gods, and our
own power system.

My art is obsessed with the image. We are bombarded with images at every turn. We can’t escape the constant force
of information, both useful and sleazy, and we don’t want to. We can’t go half an hour without the TV or Internet. These images fill a need, and studying that need and the hunger for them is part of my art. At the same time, these images are contrived to sell us something that may not exist.
An ad will demand we think about something in a particular way, in the same way the church once demanded the infallible control.

I like to take images out of context and re-contextualize them. Some of my collages are like altars, for Diana or Madonna, for example. These celebrities are goddesses; they fill a need for feminine spiritual companionship. Other pieces of my work take words and phrases I have found and juxtapose them with images. The statements may be familiar, but they are placed into a new context to encourage us to think for ourselves. Other images are simply rescued from the refuse for a new look.

Collage is the central element in most of my work. It is a never-ending source of material for the imagination. I love to twist as much as I love the twisted. I love to take meaningless and forgotten pieces and manipulate them, or change the meaning when I don’t want to be told how something is supposed to make me feel. Sometimes I am making an observation. Many times, I am only asking a question or toying with a possibility.

Many of my paintings and collages seem to evoke the jumbled, hazy world of dreams and mythology, but upon closer inspection, I believe them to reflect vividly the disorder of daily life. Dreams are, in fact, manifestations of consciousness that we cannot possibly process. The unconscious is filled with all the data we receive, making it much more ‘conscious’ than our waking self. I am exploring inner space.