I have been interested variously in notions of place as representations of need/desire/hunger/fear/identity /safe harbor/danger, and the way that we map that. I am interested in the dissonance between those ideas and the ways that systems of quantifying play out in maps. The distortions are the poetics and the knife.

I have worked with the notion of place and home for a long time. What either are is up for question. Place may be a network of alleyways, and home the cloud. For me certainly place, specific place, is very powerful, the sense of this planet is even more so, and looking up, trying to hold all the parts in the mind for a moment is amazing. That is central for me.

In my practice, the body is the first site, and the last. The body is home, power, comfort, betrayal. My visual practice started there and has moved between place and the body, with the notion of home a driving force in the work.

I have looked at maps as mathematical constructions, an overlay of measurements on a changing planet, conferring the safety of known distances, neutralizing the savagery of ice and wind. We use them as many things; for me they are a vehicle for longing and imagination, therefore fiction, lyricized and compelling. That is one remove.

I was drawn to bird migration partly because of the dumbfounding heroics of a 7000 mile flight to get to the safety of breeding grounds or the bounty of winter food, the body starving midflight, plummeting. But I was also imagining the urgency with which mapping is imprinted on the avian fuselage, how it is marked, how it fails, how birds navigate, by stars and also by what is learned and then becomes familiar. Memory maps wind, weather, disaster. We carry those maps too, and they are similarly urgent. The scrawl, the remembered hazard, forebodings, the coming to consciousness at the off-ramp. We record in fragments.

X speaks of building, moving outward in her work. I erode, scratch away, erase, trying to move in toward an imagined center, a factual bedrock.

My current work has moved toward the restless and purposeful body, its movements and tensions, surges, declines. I had been working with what is under the skin, and have moved toward tracking physical movement. The body as site, again, signaling, permeable, ephemeral, but also moving toward transitional sites such as desire and death.

Place and body are intermingled. We are physical, and gravity-bound. The physical body- ours, animals’- are perhaps the most basic filter for understanding place. The specifics of place and its maps are one way we individuate, and collectivize. We are on this hurtling rock, trying to figure things out, in a very short time.

A painter once told me, ”my country is not the land but the people.” A colleague said that for her children place does not exist, that inside, on their computers, they are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. They are in the cloud, and that is home. I live close to the ground, know it with my body, and try to understand that we are loose amalgamations shot through with particles and that the earth is changing. What we know changes with breathtaking speed, and that speed itself drives the work with exhilaration and with poignancy. The painter tracks people, friends live in the cloud. I straddle bedrock and fracture, and fold every new thing in, and try to make sense of it. I want so much to know what others see, and I speak about what I can.

EDUCATION
1987 • MFA, Ceramics & Sculpture, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA
1968 • BA, English Literature, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

TEACHING
1990-2014 • Associate Professor, University of Oregon, Art Department, Eugene, OR
1990 • Loyola Marymount University, Fine Arts Department, Los Angeles, CA
1989-90 • Scripps College, Fine Arts Department, Claremont, CA
1988-89 • California State University LONG Beach, Fine Arts Department, CA
1987-90 • University of La Verne, Fine Arts Department, La Verne, CA
1980-88 • Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA
1974-90 • Venice Community Education, LA Unified School District, Los Angeles, CA

1989 • Being by Touching,* MOA Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
1989 • Cups: Exclusive & Original, MOA Art Gallery,Los Angeles, CA
1989 • Four Ceramic Artists, Citrus College, Orange, CA
1989 • Faculty Show, Lang Art Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
1989 • Fringe of the Fringe: U. La Verne Faculty, Da Gallery,Pomona, CA
1989 • Ceramics, Raymond Todd Gallery, Isomata School of Music and the Arts, Idyllwild, CA
1989 • Sculpture, Raymond Todd Gallery, Isomata School of Music and the Arts, Idyllwild, CA
1989 • 45th Annual Scripps Ceramics Invitational, Lang Art Gallery, Claremont, CA
1989 • Clay: A Feminine Perspective, Muckenthaler Art Center, ]Fullerton, CA
1988 • Tea and Ceremony, Faith Nightingale Gallery, San Diego, CA
1988 • Collectors’ Series V: Sculptural Forms, Gallery 8, La Jolla, CA
1988 • Inaugural Exhibition, MOA Foundation, Los Angeles, CA
1988 • Ceramic Sculpture, Wita Gardiner Gallery, San Diego, CA
1988 • Sculptured Clay: Viewpoints, Contemporary Images, Sherman Oaks, CA
1988 • 5 in Clay: 5 Solo Shows, Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA*
1988 • Encodings*, Bakersfield College, Bakersfield, CA
1987 • Sana Krusoe,* Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
1987 • Continental Drift,* East Gallery, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA
1987 • Sculpture, Jeffrey Linden Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1987 • All Fired Up, Beckstrom Gallery, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
1987 • Homages, Claremont Graduate School Galleries, Claremont CA
1987 • Visual Exchange, U.C. Irvine Galleries, Irvine, CA
1987 • Fresh Signatures, Claremont Graduate School Galleries, Claremont, CA
1986 • Porcelain, Wita Gardiner Gallery, San Diego, CA
1986 • Sculptured Clay: Viewpoints, Contemporary Images, Sherman Oaks, CA
1986 • Visual Currents, Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, CA
1986 • New Art Forms,Valerie Miller & Associates, Hancock Park, Calif.
1986 • Second Coming, Claremont Graduate School Galleries, Claremont, CA
1986 • 6 Sculptors, Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, CA
1986 • Artists in Spaces: 10 Installations, CGS Galleries, Claremont, CA
1986 • Sculpture,* Weathervane Two, Santa Monica, CA
1986 • Temporary Shelter,* Da Gallery, Pomona, CA
1985 • Marking Time,* Scripps Kilnyard Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
1985 • If It were Pink It Would Match the Couch, Claremont Graduate School Galleries, Claremont, CA
1984 • 3rd Biennial Craft Exhibit, Fuller Lodge Art Center, Los Alamos, NM
1982 • Pacific Currents, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
1981 • Gallery Artists, Mandell Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1981 • Porcelain, Gallery 8, La Jolla, CA
1981 • Clay Symposium/Exhibit, Chapman College, Orange, CA
1980 • Celadon, Mandell Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
1980 • Clay Sculpture, Meyer Breier Weiss Gallery, San Francisco, CA 3 person show.

website by: RIse Visible

photography by: Camilla Dussinger