Continuing on my project on Macular Degeneration, I am delving into the potential impact on my life. “Flawed Pedigree”: Anxiety Dreams conceptualizes the distress of uncertainty that is facing me. Through my photographic sculptures I delve into the complex emotions and experiences which plague visually impaired people. The simplest tasks or enjoyments of reading, swimming, sewing, playing music and photography could be erased or at its best be severely altered. While Macular Degeneration will present challenges, my persistence and creativity in working on the project might allow me to adapt and overcome these challenges.

I have Macular Degeneration. It is a part of my genetic make-up. It is my lineage. My father, his sister and my twin brother had early onset Macular Degeneration, Stargardt’s Disease in their late teens and early 20’s. I have lived all of my life surrounded by severely visually impaired people. I know their struggles, their feelings of depression, frustration, incompetence and alienation. It is prevalent in people over 50, nearly 30%. It is most common in the white race, nearly 90% compared with other races. Sixty five percent of women compared with 35% of men will more likely get Macular Degeneration.

I am that demographic.

“Flawed Pedigree”: The Mosaic of DNA conceptualizes and recognizes my lineage and what I inherited from my father and his ancestry. The photo sculptures are mosaics creating a multi-dimensional look at my DNA. They are interplays between portraits of my paternal ancestry and images of my retina. While this series is specific to me, it will resonate with many.

Creating photographic sculptures intensifies the angst of my future. The preciseness to form each sculpture and the mathematical calculations and measurements amplifies the amount of obstacles I face as the disease progresses.

Growing up in the '50's and '60's my gender role was pigeonholed into a clearly defined category of femaleness. There were certain expectations of me as a female that were contrary to defined male roles. In "Beyond the Mundane" I give consideration to those objects in the house that are mundane, utilitarian objects: cleaning supplies, electronic parts and construction materials, specially chosen objects that might be associated with femaleness or maleness. I have manipulated and re-contextualized them into a new form removing their function and embracing androgyny. I observe viewers of my work initially responding to the abstractness of the objects. However, once cognizant of what it actually is, there is a shift in perception and identity: women identify more readily with the cleaning supplies, men with objects associated with tech or construction. This gives cause to re-evaluate assumptions and stereotypes. While gender is a construct and not a binary, do we still pigeonhole ourselves into an ill-defined collection of behaviors and characteristics that we have decided are male or female?

Influenced by the Modernist movement, I explore the formal qualities of abstraction and sculpt everyday materials, scan the fragments layering and forming something new.

Musings on the Mundane is a personal exploration of man-made, household materials used daily yet go unnoticed. We recognize them for their utilitarian purpose; we are unsettled if inventory wanes. They tend to blend within their environment. My impersonal response to and manipulation of each creates a visual rhythm of alternative shapes and forms freeing them from their utilitarian value.

Familiar and mundane things such as plastic bags, paper, an artist journal, toilet paper and newspaper become new and ambiguous. I experiment with textures, form and line removing visual references and triggering a transition from function to form. They are now recognized as something unrecognizable, a sort of collision between the representational and the abstract.

The work is solely a personal self-gratification of the tactile experience of working with the materials: folding, crushing, squeezing, ripping while immortalizing its elegance. After the process I have asouvenir of a moment, however fleeting.

As I become older I become more contemplative. Identity diminishes; youth prevails. My "utility value" is weakened.