Carolyn, when you asked me to talk about my artistic journey from this particular standpoint, it challenged me in that the subject matter has always been something I have felt would be frowned upon to discuss. Frowned upon by certain people in my life. Therefore your question is extremely interesting to try and answer in a way that is vague, yet still engaging. Especially since the beautiful thing about the installations that I make, is that for me, they, in the clearest most direct way “say it all,” without using one single word. In my earlier years, there were human interactions that I had which made me very uncomfortable with being a woman, or even a person. I myself exacerbated this by how over-perceptive I was regarding societal roles, who I felt I was, who I was told I was, and who I was expected to become. I began to see myself as  “not right” and an outsider both in my own body, and from society at large. Yet this had nothing to do with what I could or couldn’t feel on an emotional and physical level. I felt and still feel everything profoundly. But spiritually, it’s taken me years of introspection to truly like how I feel in my body, be at ease with who I am, and believe that this body I inhabit is truly mine. This outsiderness did however provide me with a hyper-analytical, perceptive, and sensitive mind, one that was always looking in, and continues to do so, from an ever-changing distance and vantage point. I see the expression on people’s faces and their body language almost too clearly. And I see the way in which one human action, feeling, and physical presence, blend together with those of others. Just as my memories do not exist in a vacuum, but instead among the memories of others I shared particular experiences with, good and bad. Human existence seems to be a vibrating entity of action and reaction in a spiral of the past, present, and future, all at once. For the brain can experience “the now,” but it doesn’t reside there. Of course, all of this loops back into my artwork, and specifically with the series I am working on now, Out Me In Me Out. I perceive there to be a loneliness and isolation in our society that has spread across the globe. At the risk of coming off as if I am transferring the feelings of my own past onto my view of the world, I can’t help but point out the similarity between what the world looks like to me now, and the way it looked during my childhood. There seems to be among humans, a growing sense of disconnectedness from the body, and somewhat of a fracturing of the human pack. I am referencing the fact that we are pack animals, like wolves and so forth.  As a mother of two, and someone who connects these observations to the pending trajectory of human sexuality, procreation, survival, and evolution, my current Five-Part Installation Series is quite apropos. Every element in this series has purpose regarding "connection" and "deflection," "seduction" and “repulsion.” The poses and placement of the life-size figures, the choices of the animals and their particular sizes, the pathways of the embedded vascular systems, the pools of Lucite milk, and the space left in-between all of the components for the viewers to meander through. Even the viewers themselves become a part of the tension in the installation in the way that they activate the entire piece.  The other activating force is Lucite. There is no other material that conveys the sentiments of this piece so poignantly. It seduces and blends with its ever changing reflections of the viewer, the surrounding light, and outside world. Yet moments later, it repels the viewer with its glare, transparency into nothingness, and refusal to give the eye a place to rest. When Lucite is coupled with the concepts that inform this series, a paradox mirroring itself appears. The paradox of how the material behaves in conjunction with that of the human condition; where the same unconscious behaviors that alienate us from ourselves and others, also strive to connect us with everyone, everything, and who we are.