About
Artist,
craftsman,
jack of all trades.
I come from a family of craftsmen and women, and learned from a young age that art could be the sweater knit by my mother, the quilt sewn by my grandmother, the pen turned by my father or the bedside table made by my great grandfather. My love and respect for hand-made things led to my fascination with the Arts and Crafts movement in America and Europe, and the Mingei movement in Japan.
As an evolving artist I was moved by the reaction to over-industrialization and the destruction of traditional crafts, and traditional ways of life. My early work was functional. After the pandemic I started to add decorative works to my repertoire. I was inspired by the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism and militarization, and fear of annihilation. But to make art is to hope, and my work shows the resiliency of nature and our chance to find balance within it.
Just as the Arts and Crafts and Mingei movements respond to the threat of annihilation of both traditional crafts and the joy in creation of the artist, my work explores how, even on a foundation of destruction, regrowth and recovery are possible.
Monorail Camera, cherry and walnut - 2025
Photographs tell stories, and film is a beautiful story teller. My photographic work is rooted in the technical process and history of crafting photographs.
After 20 years of using digital cameras, I was drawn back into film photography when I went to Kyoto in the fall of 2023, and I wanted to bring a camera other than my smart phone. After comparing models of digital cameras from point and shoots to DSLRs, I decided to go the complete opposite direction and got an instant camera with a lot of manual controls. Using it reminded me of what I loved about photography when I was younger; when taking a picture was an intentional process, it took time and it had a cost. I love the process of photography and it wasn’t long before I was looking to expand beyond instant film, so in the spring of 2024 I went to my boss at the Shelburne Craft School with the idea of offering some film photography classes, maybe starting small with just developing film and scanning it. By a stroke of pure dumb luck, one day earlier, one of our members had offered to donate all of their old darkroom supplies, so I started work building a darkroom in a supply closet.
From humble beginnings, I have tried to explore the breadth of film photography, and not limit myself to a single style, format or camera. My work includes images taken on half-frame 35mm up to large format; I use black and white, color negative and color reversal film, as well as cyanotype and tin-type.