I like to work with my hands and to tell stories. My work is both figurative and literary, in the sense of telling a story. I make reference to sculptural traditions that can be traced back to the small figurative sculptures made by Meissen, Hummel and other iconic images drawn from cartoons and heroic sculpture, but on a smaller scale. The raw clay shaped into these figures, sometimes combined with other materials, and the stories they tell, create different layers of meaning and interpretation, which speaks to who we are to each other and to ourselves.

I made The Children series during the media frenzy around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. I was thinking about how odd it was that in Nazi Germany, figures of idealized childhood became so popular at a time when actual children were being marched off to death camps. The nun who originated them said that in times of trouble, people are cheered by these kinds of images. She, herself suffered persecution by the Nazis because she was Catholic.

The Frogs is a pure fantasy that grew out of thoughts on the unruly nature of sexuality. In the original story, the wild and slithery frog is changed, by a kiss, into a benevolent, dutiful administrator. In my story, I raise the possibility that though he remains a frog, and he is alarming, the maiden finds him lovable anyway.

Phat Girl/Thin Girl and Four Women, came about because I had been to the Barnes, which is full of nudes, exclusively by men. I wanted to portray the female nude in a way that showed her as she is to herself, rather that an object of desire or a landscape.

Each series has a subject matter, but when I do the work, I turn off the chatter and let the subject inform the process in an organic way.