Since the early 1980’s I have been exploring identity as mutable and relational, shifting through context and circumstance. My focus has been on the physical and somatic body as the site for negotiating interiority and the social world. The exhibition site was often an immersive laboratory charged with psychological nuances to shed light on the paradoxes of identity. Viewers were compelled to physically interact with projection strategies that used overlapping photographic slides, video and mirrors. Relationships were revealed between the numinous qualities of myth, memory, history, dream, fantasy, desire and the material and social qualities of the specific gallery architecture and passing bodies of viewers. I understood representation to be symbolic and experiential, space and time as virtual and direct experience.

The symbolic and the experiential cannot be stripped from one another. As much as I have practiced to uncover the psycho-physical and social terrains of interiority and subjectivity, my end has always been a self-knowledge that better recognizes otherness within, in order to then better empathize with the differences of others.

Personal practice and public practice have always had a dialectical relationship for me. In 1992, I founded Kulture Klub Collaborative as a living lab of artists engaging homeless teens, bridging survival and inspiration. The more I have located aesthetics between people, the more I have understood that our personal and cultural differences require paradigm shifts in how we engage with each other.

In 2005 I completed a Masters of Dispute Resolution, learning strategies of mediation, negotiation and reconciliation. This knowledge informs and extends my artwork to explore intimacy and social engagement. My work today, using aesthetic, somatic and mediation strategies, looks more directly at the political and psychological dimensions of identity, maintaining an emphasis on the reciprocity between looking “out” at culture and looking “in” within oneself.