Biography

Early Life

Childhood: Family and Environmental Injustice

Ethical ideals and an affinity for the natural world have driven my practice as an ecological artist since childhood. I grew up as a first generation American. My parents and older sister were war refugees. Their experiences sensitized me to environmental injustice and made me responsive to philosophies held by indigenous peoples around the world about how to survive ecocide. My father’s career as an international land developer inspired my lifelong determination to undo the impacts of habitat fragmentation and destruction.

Teenage Years: Different Landscapes and Cultures

My family traveled throughout my teen years, exposing me to many landscapes and cultures. Those early travels fostered a deep interest in me about how history inflects understanding and allowed me to consider how genocide and ecocide merge. As I matured, I came to understand the implications of how the personal is political and manifests in art.

Influences

Early Influences

The first artists I was aware of were men. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s much critiqued The Song of Hiawatha was my first and most enduring introduction to indigenous wisdom as a young child. Despite the deconstruction of romance and racism in his work, his poem conveyed the compelling rhythms of native peoples’ relationships to nature. The lyrics filled my mind with how humans might coexist with other species. My family and my education exposed me to a wide range of ideas about religion, aesthetic forms, and politics. But, like many young artists, it was Leonardo D Vinci’s sketchbooks that fascinated me the most as early examples of how transdisciplinary observations could culminate in new knowledge and effect policy.

Choreography and Street Theatre

By the time I was ready to launch my career as a mature artist, I was influenced primarily by works that bridged art and life by a variety of artists. Fluxus artist Yoko Ono, John Cage, the collaborative works of Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Schumann and Allan Kaprow, and dancers from Martha Graham to Yvonne Rainer were the greatest influences on me then. They taught me to imagine choreographing space with my street theatre group, the American Ritual Theatre (1969-71).

Feminism and Ecoart

In the seventies I became aware of other artists who were feminists and, increasingly, other women who identified as ecoartists. My contemporary colleagues, from Betsy Damon to Mary Mattingly, are participants in the international ecoart Listserv invitational community I cofounded in 1999. They now represent a vibrant circle of mutual influence.