Statement

These artworks are part of a number of postcards that I altered over the last five years, after my beloved sister, Frances, died of cancer in the fall of 2006.

Before we knew she was ill, I had just finished working with yarn and had begun making fabric collages. But something strange started happening after we found out she was sick.  I began to feel like working on these pieces, or the attention I was giving them, was stealing something vital from me. Perhaps it was because I needed any additional energy outside of my playgroup to help my sister and her family. She left behind two fabulous daughters: Alli and Robin.  I asked them to decide which charity 15% of the proceeds from the sale of each postcard will go. They chose: charity: water. This website was artfully designed and executed by Alli's friend Levi Ward. Thank you to Jackie Werner for her invaluable contribution to this website.

Any artist will tell you that the relationship they have with their artwork is just that: a real relationship. In some ways just like one you might have with another person. I began to resent my work, even despise it. I folded them all up and put them away. Some were finished while others were not. I have recently begun working on the unfinished ones again and starting new ones, but it is still difficult, as they are rooted in that horrible desperation and sadness surrounding Frances's illness and then death.

My dear friend Nora Blanck and I both attended Silvermine College of Art in the late 1960s. Since 1971 we have corresponded with each other. Over the years we've sent each other long rambling letters about our lives, she in Vancouver, BC and me in New York City.

We often decorate the envelopes containing the letters. We also both have a history of decorating or altering postcards, although I believe Nora started this tradition between us. We are not alone: many artists have altered postcards, some even making them their primary art. Additionally, working with children gives me a special relationship to stickers.

While my sister was sick my artwork consisted of making watercolors, but very few. It was like the lowest possible flame on the stove that keeps the pot of soup warm. Slowly, after that fall in 2006, I began to work on these postcards. They came easily and joyously. I began what is now a huge collection of stickers that I look through with each postcard I alter. And each tells a story of that moment in time: what I'm going through emotionally, what I think is funny, and what I "know" from many years of looking at art and making it. Some are tongue-in-cheek, while others comment on art history. I'm often simply responding to the picture itself.  Most of them are altered with stickers, some are drawn on, some have both, and still others are cut into with an X-Acto knife. Some are at least partially informed by who sent it to me and when, or who gave it to me and what I think I know about them.  I show the backs so that you, also, can see the history or at least what the original postcard was before I changed it.  My attitude about them is as with all art that I've made over the last 43 years: It is about what makes sense to me at that moment.