Meditative Tiles are an attempt to convey thoughts, ideas, colors and emotions into one form. I've used the Christian Cross as a starting point on some tiles and some animal images for others. The idea is to look at the tiles and receive "something" back from them.....I've used them for wall hangings, framing, and for yard posts.

Discarded construction wood becomes an art fence. Each piece reflects something in the wood. Each piece is unique within itself. Each piece has been sawed, cut, painted and reflected upon.
It was interesting to me to see how each piece materialized. I really had to think over each piece: how woould I cut it into some recognizable or un-recognizable shape, what color(s) to paint it, how to position each piece.
It took me many months to reflect upon each piece of wood. As I have said in most of my project descriptions, the wood gives me ideas and inspiration on how to "craft" each piece.
There are a total of 30 different art pieces in the Art Fence. You can see them all on Sweat Air Street in Hampden

Energy is a totme made from discarded contruction wood and a piece of wood from a 150-year old barn door. The piece came together in my mind as I viewed the construction wood-how it looked, the curves in the wood and the split in the wood. I thought it looked like something that could have legs. I worked first on the legs and then shaped the head. I added the arm in the middle of the piece to represent two arms and two hands. I painted the totem to reflect the energy pulsing from the extremities of the form culminating in the outstretched hand/finger. Painted blue with wire for hair. It looks great in the garden...seemingly pushing the energy it has out into the world.

Art made from Gourds. Or rather the gourds become art because of what they are. Mixed media, found objects are combined to make images. The images come from "observing" the gourds, placing them into different positions or how they, themselves are formed: their contours, shapes, malformed or mixed together: inspiration are all part of the conditions I use to make gourd art.

All my totems come from visions initiated by the wood itself. I look at the wood- whether from 100-old wood cut from trees here in Baltimore, 100-year plus wood grown or developed at our family farm, wood grown in our Hampden backyard or wood scavenged from Hampden, all wood develops a personality unto itself. I bring that personality...and spirit out into the totems.

"Totem" means something different to each individual. You can use the dictionary meaning: " an object serving as athe emblem of a family or clan and oftern as a reminder of its ancestry" as a starting point. None of my totems reflect my family's history, but rather denote what I see in the wood, from the tree itself. In a sense, I am creating an emblem of the trees' prior existence.