Mixed Media • Portraits • Masks

These opening, mixed media pieces are inspired by African art and photographs of African tribal people like the Maasai.

Since very few early acupuncture prototypes were women or models of varied nationalities, I began casting people as a way of learning anatomy. Clay was my earliest medium. I built the body in clay, in a course called “Anatomy in Clay,” given in a medical school. That eventually led me to apprentice with a forensic artist who reconstructed peoples’ faces in clay. Plaster came later. Portraits and masks capture a kind of “energetic” imprint of each persons’ face: warm wet plaster bandages are placed directly on the models’ face or body, drawings attention inward: a kind of a meditation. The facial detail comes from placing  skin safe products directly on the skin and supporting them with plaster shells.

Papier mâché animal masks are playful and fanciful creations made over animal skulls, cardboard, newspaper or wire armatures, inspired by puppet builds at Heart of the Beast in Minnesota, (an outgrowth of the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont) and Spiral Q, in Philadelphia, as well as the well known Lion King play.