As a visual artist I travel the globe photographing migrating birds for my ongoing series Aves. Passionate about nature and geomythology I amassed a collection of stones and minerals indigenous to places I visited. Their mystical beauty and energy inspired me to seek out ways in which they could inform my art practice. I experimented in the studio with several mediums, in time, discovering a unique epoxy compound and developing ways to apply it, hand molding, sculpting, and shaping it around the stones. What began as an amusing diversion in my practice, which had been primarily digital, has grown into a full time labor of tangible love.

 

Armed With Ardor is wearable art; each creation has a title which serves as a symbol for the properties of a stone it incorporates. It draws inspiration from the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-Sabi; raw yet meticulously crafted by hand, each piece is unique. It is a meditation on form and essence, hard angles and fluidity, the raw and the refined, and a spiritual dialogue between feminine and masculine, stellar and earthly, the inner and the outer. It is a tribute to the Great Mystery and the Divine Spirit within each of us, as unique and special as each stone created by nature. The pieces are not premeditated but inspired and dictated by the energy and character of each individual stone. Armed With Ardor is a collection of symbols, objects for incantation of rituals and memories, and facilitators of inspiration and discovery, grounding and guidance, protection and healing.