Louise Berliner
My professional experience includes work as a magazine editor, news-paper columnist, proofreader and museum educator. My fiction has appeared in VQR, The Mom Egg, Sacred Fire, and I published a biography, Texas Guinan, Queen of the Night Clubs with U of Texas Press. Though primarily a writer, I’ve always been a maker of art. In addition to my current pre-occupation with baskets and word-woven sculpture, I collage, draw and paint.

Jeanne Borofsky
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My love of words, letters, text, type, books and icons has led me to create these pieces. Primarily using encaustic collage, I create images inspired by all of these, and even math. I'm fascinated with the look and shape of books - their resemblance to icons - all those pages covered in words - the way they can stand on their own. These pieces don't all have a traditional text - the images and words combine to give the viewer an impression.

As usual, maps, mail and whimsey are ever present in my work. Nothing seems complete without a trace of one or the other.

I love the way beeswax creates both physical and visual depth and translucency to my work - adding to the mystery and magic I’m trying to convey. Whatever I put into my art, it always includes the joy of creation, the love of art, and the happiness in my ability to create it.

Miss Lyn Cardinal
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My work is fueled by two quite different obsessions:
First is the drive to represent a singular kind of image; organic forms floating in space. This need has been with me since I began creating artwork, unwittingly at first and quite knowingly now, I base my work on these shapes. They come with me no matter where I go; oils, pastels, acrylics; drawing or painting. . I believe they are born from a visual language that is part of a collective subconscious.
Second is my love of collage and combining objects, surfaces, textures and text. I find inspiration not only in the beauty of a single found-object but by the magic created when it is richly layered with the grace of the written word and other objects.

Currently, I combine collage and my organic forms onto a single surface. Currently it is a split surface which, to me, represents the many aspects of dualism; mind/body, perception and reality, the inner and outer self.
I work intuitively, combining media, building layers and using personal symbolism and imagery to evoke a feeling, story or scenario and to create the connections between the two aspects of my work.

Abigail Child
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To foreground margins, of form and content, what we usually don’t examine, to speculate around the body as culture, to derange its narratives. My desire: to explode our preconceived notions. Form is intrinsic to this explosion. Then, how to remain human(e) within the reordering, how to touch the world we live in, how to be in and outside, how to pierce everyday so each moment is sacred, laughable, lasts. I use strategies— of asymptotic convergence, vertical montage, a-harmonic weave, digital archive, language mis-translation, sonata look-a-likes, sound and noise juxtapositions— jolly and foreboding. In a world cluttered with information and things, it is important to go below and behind, to unmake sense, to re-contextualize the given and refresh, to upset powers that restrain us. The desire—a maneuverability— fragmented, prismatic, fleeting.

David Curcio
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I try to merge traditional printmaking with simpler, more direct methods of mark making to depict images that are at once decorative and deeply personal.

While I am a great admirer of quilts and other domestic items created by self-taught artists, my own training in printmaking is extremely formal. As I have no training with textile art, stitching and embroidering is a means by which I can strive for the purity and simplicity of the self taught art I admire without (I hope) being disingenuous. In creating the current body of work, I inevitably became more comfortable with the humble, direct techniques that were at first so alien to me. In response to this growing confidence, I force myself further into deeply personal subject matter in order to stay outside of my comfort zone. At the same time I maintain a general focus on the decorative aspects of each piece in an attempt to maintain surface-level appeal. I hope that for the viewer to whom the subject matter holds no weight or meaning, it is a least enjoyable to look at.

Kay Dolezal
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From 1995 to 2000 most of my work was jewelry, but I also loved to make small vessels or figures. In 2000 I began a series of beaded collars or neckpieces which referred more directly to textiles. I was then moved to make containers to hold them when they were not being worn.

I also began exploring what three dimensional forms were possible using the right-angle weave stitch and its capacity for layering. I can also exploit the layering in a flat piece so that the back and front of a piece can be different.

Around 2001 I began to explore ways to put text into the beadwork. I often found myself responding to events in the larger world. Since 2003 this has led me to make containers and wall pieces and even books in which I am attempting to express my ideas through material, images, and text. I feel a happy connection between the historical use of textiles to convey messages and the current trend in the art world to combine image and text.

Ann Forbush
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I have always been fascinated by "marks" that living things leave behind in the form of fossils, vessels, shadows and handwriting. These elements recur in my prints. Most recently, I've incorporated the idea of "marks" left by the spoken word: remembered conversations, known quotes, personal admonitions. Often, my visual ideas spring from verbal sources that suggest a narrative without spelling out the whole story.

Through the use of delicate paper stencils and carved blocks, I have developed a cache of personal icons that take on new meanings depending on their context. Some of my stencils are easily recognized objects, while others are more ambiguous or metaphorical. The stencils can be re-used, but, only for a short time; this transient quality gives them a "life span" all their own.

Fran Forman
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I make photographic images combining portraiture with dreamed landscapes and the natural world. As my work creates juxtapositions in time as simultaneous and non-linear, it also re-imagines relationships of scale and physical possibility. Although my images violate the laws of physics, they honor the interdependence and connections of humanity with the animals, insects, and plants, which populate the natural world.

My collaged images often begin with tintype portraits of ordinary mid-19th c. Americans, on which I paint, reviving the fashion of that time. In isolating the figures from their studio backdrops, I dissolve the traditional boundaries of time and place. I replace the imaginary scenes used as backdrops with my own invented photographic reality. I hope to suggest the connection of humble portraiture to contemporary technology, children to the cosmos, humanity to the natural world, and the spiritual to the physical.

My work draws inspiration not only from 19th c. pictorialist photography but chiefly from the 20th c. artists who used color, visual narratives and symbolism to contemplate the human condition: the juxtaposed assemblages of Joseph Cornell, the paintings of Rene Magritte, and the poetry and photography of Duane Michaels.

Jenny Lawton Grassl
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I make digital collages with poems, and traditional collages with poems in boxes. Usually we think of words as abstractions and nature as something concrete, but in these pieces words also take on concreteness and elements of nature become abstract. The idea of the unknowable territory of relationships finds its form in nature and language in my work.

Some of the images show writing or printing where letters are recognizable though the whole looks foreign or like an ancient alphabet. This is what I call visual automatic writing. The Surrealists and Dadaists practiced automatic writing, writing whatever came to mind without editing. In visual automatic writing I do this but place the letters visually, not sequentially to form words that are readable. This allows the alphabet as form to have emphasis, its meaning obscured. I am interested in layers of revealed and obscured meaning.

I use paintings, photographs, and found objects in my work, and also explore the shapes of letters in paintings, always writing automatically as I go.

Melanie Hedlund
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Growing up on a farm in the middle of the country, the foundation for my work was laid from such simple acts as walking the beans and stacking racks of hay bales. When I began to make sculpture at Reed College and asked perplexing questions: “Why use one thing instead of another? Why does something look like art?” answers came while creating environments in which things would happen. I wanted to be in my sculptures.

Moving to California, I immersed myself in dance, ranging from contact improvisation to trapeze work, and then to NYC into the downtown scene of performance art. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s I performed my own theatrical, musical, movement pieces, and worked with artists ranging from the Harmonic Choir to Sally Silvers. I was still swinging from long ropes. My photographs, scores and collages were published in downtown presses. For over a decade I was archiving and cataloguing a major Fluxus collection. The influence of this work remains strong. In Boston I have continued to collaborate with musicians and dancers and to make things from what comes my way.

Trish Elwood O'Day
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Photography is an odyssey of exploration of my surroundings and ultimately myself. I cannot define what draws me to a particular subject, but the attraction is intense. Often I find myself lost within the process, attempting to capture the essence of my subject. My goal is to deconstruct an image to its basic elements. Line and shape are of special interest as I search for the inherent composition presented by my subject . The impact and emotional underpinnings of color are fascinating; while the nuance of ever changing light intrigues and challenges me. The "looking and the seeing " involved in this process force me to ask questions and search for answers.

I never know where photography will take me or what I will discover. It is a great adventure.

Heather Townsend
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Some years ago, I became interested in the idea of writing in three dimensions. In particular, I envisioned a book with clear pages, where forms—made of words—would seem to hang in air. So I set out to make such a book and found that, by sandblasting text onto sheets of glass, I could create the effect I sought. For example, in the glass book "Trees in Winter," words wind into the silhouettes of trees, receding into a snowy distance. Since I develop text and shapes together, they inform one other, often in oblique ways. In "Trees in Winter," the words create a narrative, partly a meditation on the paradox of bare trees (apparently lifeless, but filled with life), partly a meditation on parallax and distance. It is not important to me that every passage be legible to the viewer; I'd hope rather that snatches of phrases, shifting images, and the stillness of the glass can be triagulated by the viewer to form meaning from many angles.

James Zall
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James Zall's photographs provide a fresh perspective on familiar scenes and objects. He seeks out the kind of view that's usually absorbed by the eye but filtered out by the mind. These are often improbable little worlds that exist only temporarily, when viewed from a specific angle or in a particular light.