My artwork is an ongoing narrative of the influences that have governed my life. As I have worked through the images of women and men, family, and cultures, art making has become a process of discovery of those values that give substance to my life. The search has enabled me to reconcile cultural differences, human sexuality, and philosophical beliefs that have ordered and effected my life as a woman.

I was born in a small town in California to Portuguese parents. In the early days the town was very prejudiced and bigoted over anyone that wasn't Swedish or Protestant. However, an early series of the Swedish culture enabled me to better understand the conflicting nature of our differences.

My later work dealt with images of women gossiping, aging, divorced, and alone.  A review by Robert Ewing, a critic from Los Angeles on my exhibit at the Orange County Center of Contemporary Art, best described my early work in the following review:

"In the images-of old ladies gossiping, locked up in nursing homes clutching teddy bears, ladies playing sexual games in bars and dance halls, brooding in the luxuriously furnished boudoirs-what comes across is the emptiness and dreariness of these lives played out against the promises of youth, beauty, and middle class materialism."

In a recent large mural design I did of the Swedes, the African Americans, and the Mexican-American cultures in our town, was an attempt to celebrate our uniqueness, our history and those qualities that each group contributes to the makeup of our small village.

In my current digital work entitled: Lost in Translation, I have appropriated and re-contextualized images and text of the Old Masters and writers of the Holy Books in an attempt to confront negative attitudes regarding women's' spirituality and sexuality, on discrimination towards homosexuality, and on war.

My town, it's people, and family continue to be a valuable resource for making art. Their cultural and philosophical beliefs have shaped my life. In the process, my art has become a means of defining who I am and to better understand the forces that have governed our lives.