Biography

1960’s-70’s

Beginning at a very early age, my search for understanding took a cosmic centered course. While I was born and raised on a working farm in NH with a close connection to Nature, I never experienced it as a separate field of objects, rather as a living dimension of ourselves whose conditions of existence had a direct effect on our own, and whose health and abundance was likewise affected by our thoughts and actions. I lived with a feeling of inseparable oneness with the Earth and a greater Force which ushered life into form. I was a deeply contemplative child and found both singing and writing poetry were means through which I could explore my inner world and express my experience of Nature and the self. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s home was less than a mile away and I always felt the muse which served him; the open frequency of creative energy so cherished by an artist, still flowed freely in the area through those sensitive enough to receive it. I wrote often as a girl, but it was my passion and innate gift for singing that first took me beyond the commonly held notion of the self as separate and physical to a tangible experience of a much greater totality. I often disappeared in idle hours into the tall grass acres or cathedral like barn loft of our farm, where singing long tones that merged in perfect harmony with the breezes whispering across the fields charioted me into vast unknown realms. In these youth full years, like seeds of summer corn, the seeds of sound as a tool for transcending the physical, opening my inner sensitivity to subtle energies, and evolving a more unconditioned perception of Light were planted in me.

In my early teens, local physicians and a team of Boston Neurologists diagnosed me as having an inoperable brain anomaly, offering only the palliative support of seizure medications and an undetermined amount of time to live. With those words, I was awakened to the fact of how suddenly a life of beauty and bliss can be stolen away. Three months later in a moment alone with my fears, I sensed a radiant shift in Light within me, as brilliant as the sun against the dark emotions overshadowing and circling through me at that time. It was unlike any previous physical or intellectual experience, and I knew that I would somehow survive. In hindsight, I believe the memory of that experience is part of what drew me to the extreme contrast of black and white images. With no physical medical explanation, I never had another seizure and all that remained of the abnormality was what looked like residual scarring with no measurable effects. After this, my life would be a search in the world of matter and within myself for greater understanding of that experience.

My search for answers began in the physical sciences, graduating with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing from St. Anselm College. Of even more lasting significance was the opportunity to live amid the rigors and rituals of the college’s Benedictine monastic culture; to feel the power of sacred chant for the first time, and to have my ideas challenged by daily encounters and conversations with Monks dedicated to a life of meditation, spiritual devotion and service.

1980’s-90’s

I went on to practice as a neurosurgical nurse at Columbia Presbyterian Neurological Institute while completing my Strategic Health Planning and Management graduate studies at Columbia University. On one level it was an effort to honor and pay back the gift of my unexplainable recovery by helping others overcome disease and suffering. But it was also a way to follow a path where I did not have to reveal my true sensitivity or a perception that did not fit the ordinarily accepted frame of reality. Writer Andre Debus III has an uncanny way of getting to the heart of someone’s story and upon meeting him many years later commented, “you have a strong artist’s vibe". I answered “Yes, I suppose it becomes palpable over time; not just the work we carry into being but the way waves of life and Light flow through us. The way we face the same experiences as everyone else, but clearer and harder because our perception has always been and continuously grows more subtle and our sensitivity more refined.” I told him, “Earlier in life, I tried to run from this ripped bare openness and deeply felt connection to nature and humanity and bury it in other pursuits. People would be shocked if they knew when I attended Columbia in New York, I lifted weights every day and worked out with the Harlem gang kids ‘til I looked like a body builder and someone you wouldn’t want to cross late at night in the elevator going up to the surface from the lower level of the IRT train.” Neither my overbuilt frame or my career in healthcare would be permanent, but classes with architecture students at Columbia’s School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning significantly influenced how I approached form in my later work as a photographer. I would find a close kinship with those architects who demonstrated a reverence for the all-pervading elements of earth, water, light and air, and endeavored to create designs which did not compromise, but rather made both the physical and non-physical dimensions of a space more evident.

After graduate school, exploding corporate health care opportunities brought me to Phoenix Arizona. While working for hospitals for 12 years in the vast open desert of Arizona, both my unusually refined spatial awareness and sensitivity to sound would find new expression. I began a cherished musical collaboration with jazz pianist Charles Lewis. He would also become an adept spiritual guide to the writings of Alice Bailey, Rudolph Steiner, Krishnamurti, and auspicious meetings with Torkom Saraydarian. Later I would recognize these as fundamental discoveries that sparked the beginning of a conscious journey of unfolding awareness. During this period, I was also profoundly influenced by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright through visits to Taliesin West and his visionary protégé Paolo Soleri. I met Paolo after performing at a concert in the theatre of his utopian city of Arcosanti. Living in the rigidly regulated halls of physical medicine and surgery by day, Paolo made it OK for me to imagine a world beyond mass perception, to never doubt its reality, and to find the courage to advance beyond our pre-conceptions to where true creativity lives…where finite mind and senses bow so a more infinite Consciousness and potentiality may stand. I was also invited by a mutual friend to spend time at the Verde Valley foundry /studio of sculptor John Henry Waddell. His work is one seamless serene affirmation of human worth and unlimited potential. Each one of his figurative forms celebrated our existence as a dance of liberation and light, and as a flight of transcendence, even as we carry the weight of our dense flesh and bones. Sometimes it seems a very old connection exists where there is no reasoned explanation for it, and it was like this with Rotraut Klein Moquay, a German born painter and sculptor, wife of the late Yves Klein, and sister to German Sculptor Guenther Ueker. I remain deeply grateful for the nearly 5 years spent close to her creative process during my Arizona stay. Surrounded by monolithic monochromatic forms of life emerging in matter or canvases of light pouring forth out of galaxies still undiscovered, she worked and I watched and wrote, each on a journey to materialize the intangible. Though years yet from my own visual art work, we both felt closely aligned with a subtle world of primordial frequencies, a geometry of elemental energies shaped by the play of polarities, an electro-magnetism which calls forth the Light, and that union of cosmic Energy and Intelligence without which none of it would exist. Her spark would endure and inspire me to courageously follow the thread of Light that communicates through the movement of the universe, the landscape of our planetary life, and the vast dimensions of our inner being, and to project it visually in a way that related what I knew of it. These years were also colored by the Scottsdale gallery exhibitions of Riva Yares whose highly refined and fearless curatorial eye offered visitors an incomparable visual arts education. Hours spent sitting among the images and ideas of Alex Katz, Milton Avery, Norman Bluhm, James G. Davis, Estaban Vincente, Chihuly before he was a global phenomenon, Marisol, and a beloved Matta fed my hungry yet unconscious exploration of the role and creative process of visual art.

1997-Present

In extended travel from Arizona to India and the Himalayas, my emerging conception of a cosmic current networked throughout all creation, dynamic lines of elemental energies condensing into physical forms, and of a microcosm of this cosmic system of creation vibrating within every human became clearer and seemed to be repeated over and over in every ancient Hindu and Buddhist mandala and symbolic yantra I encountered. All other conditioned conceptions dissolved in the landscapes and eyes of the East. After India I made a critical decision to leave corporate life and returned permanently to New England where in a rich environment of devoted inquiry, practice and discovery close to Nature, I would be guided and inspired by 3 Masters of Kundalini, Naada (Sound) and Swaara (Breath) Yoga and Meditation. Practicing yoga and mantra meditation opened a period of conscious inner development which further refined my inner sensory awareness and perception, and with it came an unexpected and unquenchable appreciation for the relationship of Light, matter and Consciousness. That defining moment of all-pervading luminous healing presence I felt within as a teen and had long sought to relive seemed palpable again, not just within the confines of the self but in all forms in nature, and it called out to be expressed in images.

Key to my meditation was learning to direct the senses of smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing inward rather than outward toward the external physical environment. So, it took me some time to re-imagine photography as more than a medium that kept us busy with externally directed vision, and images that entertained the emotions or perpetuated a limited physical sensory experience of reality. I understood how to work with Sound and wanted to understand how photography could project the more subtle multidimensional experiences of my continually evolving inner sensory perception. The answer came when a respected Teacher told me, “They are the same Energy. Light is just a more dense form of cosmic Sound, and in its most dense form it becomes visible. There are also more subtle dimensions of Light whose presence you perceive, and perhaps in images you can give others a feeling of those.”

A major turning point in my work with Light and photography occurred in early 2015 when the elder Paul Caponigro invited me to his home and studio in Cushing Maine. There was an immediate synchronicity of our ideas, inner experience and desire to serve the Light that was more profound than in any meeting before or since. At the end of our first visit, he inscribed a copy of his “Meditations in Light” for me with the words, “Your search is over, work well in the medium you have found.” It was a connection that strengthened my will to translate my experience in images, and helped focus my creative, intuitive and perceptive faculties beyond any question or doubt in the medium. Just being in his presence elevated my work. On each cherished visit, it was as if the universal Light which passed through him to be revealed in images came pulsing with greater energy and clarity through me as well, somehow magnified by our shared devotion and pure intentions. In Caponigro was the experience of Minor White’s awakened spirituality and in Minor White was Edward Weston’s love of nature, so in meeting Paul I felt I met all three. It was a lineage that would serve as the foundation for a life now given to the challenge of projecting images of a more unbound reality. I remember him brewing and serving coffee like a Zen tea ceremony and with unsparing candidness saying, “You must edit brutally. You should be drawn to make an image of Nature intuitively. It should have no reasoned meaning or purpose and must resonate beyond any intellectual or imagined experience. In time, in developing it, you will sense the universal qualities that connected you to it… that moment of union between Nature and your own human Nature.” At an art opening after joking about my “kundalini problem”, referring to my perception of the subtle energy body fulcrum along the spine and how that informed my composition, Caponigro said to another photographer, “She will change the way people view and value digital photography.” He said it with the certainty and confidence that makes something inevitable in time, as if he knew he had the power to strengthen my own confidence, will, and capacity to serve the Light and fulfill his prophecy. Ultimately, I would say I did not pursue photography, it pursued me. I had experiences, energies that wanted to be shared, and images are what best served their expression. Caponigro’s insight on this was “it is often the things we will for ourselves that take us on long circuitous routes off the course of our true destiny, and it is the unknown, unimagined path we surrender to, compelled by a Will beyond the self that leads us to our intended purpose and greatest fulfillment.”

To make art as a projection of a more intuitive, inner sensory perception is not a point and shoot, fast path. To evolve a creative process that happens through you rather than by you can take many years, even a lifetime, of fearless self-exploration depending on the practices employed and one’s devotion and desire to break free of the conditioned limits of our more accessible and historically dominant physical senses. My search for a medium of expression is over, but the quality and depth of what I translate through photography, my ability to perceive and project an experience of the infinite in the finite and the cosmic in the mundane continues to evolve with my unending inner search to realize more of the totality of Nature and the self. When asked now, I say I am a photographer and perceptive sculptor, but more than that, I am a seed planter, born among fields of corn that in my life grew over time into fields of more cosmic dimension. Whatever I project in images from those fields of unbound Nature, they hold within them a vision of all humanity as radiant and complete, purified and illumined by Light and made whole by the Consciousness rising within and connecting each of us and all forms in nature to a more unlimited totality.