I live in Brooklyn, New York. The history, community, debris, languages, and industry of my metropolis are a huge source of materials and inspiration. Working in other countries has also had a profound influence on my work. For the past four summers, I've been teaching art to children in rural El Salvador. I learn as much, if not more, from looking at children's art and talking with them about their process and ideas as I do from the museums and galleries of New York. Using art as a tool to outline and interpret their relationships to family, food, school, work, society and death provides such a simple visual vocabulary, so eloquent and universal. In my own work, I'm often examining relationships to language. I like using text; I use the printed word as a pattern, and I often refer to changes in syntax in translation. A year long trip to Southeast Asia has also contributed to my use of text, as well as broadened themes of language, water, war, memory, and childhood. While traveling, I concentrated on collecting collage material: old children's encyclopedias and alphabet books, found photographs, sewing patterns, maps, deeds, gravestone rubbings, diagrams and instructional manuals, mid-century magazine advertisements, medicine labels, food packaging, candy wrappers and other ephemera. I incorporated what I found and saw in the streets, neighborhoods and marketplaces into the narratives of my pieces: people carrying towers of goods on their heads, toys constructed from tin cans and old bottles, houses and bird-feeders made of corroding metal bomb carcasses. In these countries that have been so damaged by years of war and poverty, I became fascinated by how everyday experiences and ordinary objects related to destruction, chaos, immigration, survival and loss. Something very mundane and ordinary could be a symbol of safety, shelter, or peace, while simultaneously being a relic of war. It is in this context that I am drawn to the use of simple imagery: an airplane, a house, water, shoes, birds. Combining discarded materials to make these narratives, such as a schoolgirl with a dress quilted from teabags, or a portrait of a woman with a crushed eggshell shawl, is like creating a shrine, or providing a sanctuary for people, places and objects that need mending.