hello there!
I’m an Ohio native living in Fort Collins, Colorado with my husband, two boys, an orange and white cat, and our one hundred and fifty-ish pound pup. Graphic design and project management have been my career for nearly twenty five years, but making the leap to being an artist has been completely new territory. While it didn’t happen overnight, my abstract tissue paper collage artwork has grown out of my accumulated time living and working in the American southwest, the midwest, and now near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It all started by creating a fun, unique texture for the background of a kid’s summer art program brochure with tissue paper, and has matured into the playful yet sophisticated tissue compositions you see here today. Blending colors and using cut and torn paper to create textural, organic forms brings me both peace and happiness, and I’d like to share that joy with you.
Layering the fine tissue paper allows me to utilize the material’s inherent transparency to yield color compositions and palettes that feel similar to mixing paint. I’ve never met a hue I didn’t love! Organic patterns in nature, a passion for midcentury design, architecture graduate school, and my graphic design work are a few of the things that consistently inspire me to make simple, vibrant artwork elevating a humble and often overlooked material.
In January 2020, an exhibition of my work titled tisshue opened at Dattner Architects in New York City. It featured fourteen tissue paper collage pieces including a wide range of compositions and bold, color palettes. My work is currently available at Minted, mpix, West Elm Kids — rainbow clouds, mod toucan, paper space I and paper space II, West Elm, Pottery Barn Kids, and previously at Target, The Affordable Art Fair NYC, and The Met. In October 2024, I participated in the Fort Collins Artist Studio Tour and Sale at Kestrel Fields Studio.
why the passion for children’s literacy?
One of my favorite childhood memories revolves around Scholastic book orders. The paper catalog would be distributed and I remember pouring through the books, posters, and stickers with wide eyes. Our mom would splurge on one thing for me and my bibliophile sister, and it was these book orders. We were the only kids who would get a whole box to lug home our new books (and posters, those were actually my favorite). And we felt like the luckiest kids around when those book orders arrived at school.
Fast forward many years where my first two jobs after college were working in the educational publishing field. While I worked on a variety of subjects over the course of nine years, K–6 reading anthologies were some of my main projects. I fell in love with storybooks and illustrations all over again. At some point over these years, I learned the grim statistics about the future for kids struggling to read. For example, students who are not proficient in reading by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school than proficient readers (from Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters, A KIDS COUNT Special Report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation). WOW!
During my final year working in educational publishing in Tucson, Arizona, I volunteered as a reading coach. The organization paired me with a third grade boy and I would work with him once a week. At first he was really apprehensive and shy with me, and I realized how awkward I could be with kids and how ill equipped I felt as an adult/coach. I think I tried to dive into the reading exercises I was trained to complete in a very clinical way, but it was clear that I needed to build up trust with him. The books I initially brought with me were not sparking his interest nor doing me any favors in the trust-building category. At some point in those first few weeks, he started talking to me about Bakugan and I had no clue what he was referencing—mind you, I didn’t have a smart phone at this time so I couldn’t look it up. When I got back to work I googled Bakugan and learned it was an anime series and low and behold, our local bookstore had Bakugan early readers available. The next week when we met, his eyes bulged when I showed him the readers. Finally! Sometimes he just wanted to talk about the illustrations, but we were able to work our way through the books and I truly saw his reading progress over the course of the school year. While I know I only spent a small amount of time with him every week and I was not doing the real teaching work, I saw a switch flip when he found something he was interested in reading, and it’s always stuck with me.
