I grew up as a flower child of the 60’s in a suburb of the SF Bay Area. Next door was Janis Joplin and down the street lived Dickens 44 Bascom a mixed media artist. My father was a painting teacher at College of Marin and Mother was a sculptor. My elder brother was an actor and as a family we frequented the theatre, art museums and the beach. As a child I was terribly crafty and was drawn into fantastical worlds created with toys, beads, microfilament, found objects from the natural world and and glue. I was also fascinated by the life in tide pools and in pond water viewed through my grade school microscope. Though in my teen years my creative love was dance I always studied the visual arts including, printmaking, jewelry, photography and drawing. Not quite knowing how to make a living through art, I went to college and studied speech and communications. I earned a masters degree and found teaching was my professional destiny. I was hired at Portland Community College and taught speech and communication for 20 years. Portland is also a creatively fecund environment so in my free time I took classes in art history, sculpture and glass. Bullseye Art Glass original factory and resource center was in Portland and they offered cutting edge classes and gallery shows in art. After taking several of their classes I was able to create a body if work in kiln formed glass and then applied to Rochester Institute of Technology to peruse an MFA in Glass art. I returned to Portland in order to keep my “day job” which ended up being a wise decision because not long after my return I was hit by some disabling chronic health issues. Having the care my job provided at that time might have saved my life. I continued to work as long as I could, all the while creating kiln formed glass. It wasn’t until I retired that I was able to do my most sophisticate work in Pate de Verre (Paste of glass). Never really catching my breath long enough to show much of my work, I recently discovered through displaying the body in total in my studio in Benica that there is a clearly identifiable voice. It all resonates from my early fascinations with jewels and microbiology, the tension that occur between the natural and artificial world.