Female

41

With the exception of a brief visit to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I am a self-taught artisan who creates strange assemblages out of natural ephemera and binds books by hand. Both of these are the result of a childhood suffused with story and with magic—the elusive magic of fairy tales read to me from the brittle pages of very old books and of the more physical magic of the wild nature that surrounded me.

It was in the wooded garden behind my grandmother's house that I developed a deep appreciation of the ancient earth and those things that remain of seasons past. My art is a means of communicating the understanding I've gained through the observation of and participation in the natural cycles of the land. It was in the world of story—old tales of the wood, of wolves and witches and princes who turn into frogs—that I found a desire to tell my own small tales. My writing is a means of spinning straw into gold, of pulling life's dross through the eye of the fantastic and sewing it up into stories, much liked those that I was once told.

As well as being an artist and writer, I am the co-editor of Cabinet des Fées, a journal of fairy tale fiction and the founder of Papaveria Press, a small press specializing in fairy tales & fabulous visions.