The artist Clark Derbes invited me to work on a performance at a secret skateboarding site that he painted in the cracks of time while his baby slept. His process reminded me of writing my dissertation within the demands of work and motherhood.

Features of the skate park operate both as functional objects and as social sculptures in Joseph Beuys’ sense of the term. When Clark invited me to create a performance in his space, an abandoned stretch of highway that the Burlington skate community had come to claim as a skatepark, I was immediately attracted. I was struck by the way the skaters leaned into the space, creating what they needed for their maneuvers, and what turned out to be meaningful social sculptures.

Matt LaRocca and Graham Fisk performed on instruments built from old skate decks. Meanwhile skateboarders jumped over dancers as the audience moved down paths covered with Clark’s paintings. For 40 magical minutes, we opened up a collective crack in space and time, then just like that, it was gone.

Early childhood memories of riding in my parents’ old Volkswagen Beetle sparked the idea for this piece. I vividly remember the irony of my family’s ill-smelling car transporting me into the fairytale experience of seeing Schloss Neuschwanstein for the first time. Starting with these memories, I modeled AutoBiography’s first incarnation after Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

The Car Opera unfolded in a parking garage – a liminal space where people from all walks of life converge in random moments. In the parking garage, just like in traffic, we are all equal. With that in mind, we transformed five floors of the Marketplace Garage in Burlington, Vermont into an immersive environment that remained fully operational to the public throughout the performance.

As only four people at a time could fit into a car, we ran guided tours with groups of four, by invitation with one group departing every 15 minutes. At the same time, an unlimited number of people were able to purchase a program (designed as a car manual) for a self-guided tour. Participants in the guided tours appeared as actors from the perspective of the individuals on self-guided tours – as if both sets were involved in a red carpet experience.

I remember hearing the startled gasps when I stepped inside the trench and let the water run down my body. Performers and audience had to sign a liability waiver and put on hardhats in order to enter the facility — a secret and special place that had been boarded up for years.

The audience (limited to 80 invitees) following a tour guide, walked through a group of dancers who brought the daily activities of plant workers back to life. They were then led down metal stairs to the basement where waist deep trenches were filled with cooling water that circulated between the lake and the plant.

Screenprint on paper.

The concept of liminality is found in ritual as well as in nature. Liminality occurs in the space between: the space between land and water, between dirt and rock, the space between layers of connective tissue in our bodies and the space between the end of an exhale and the beginning of the next inhale. The space between creates entry points, invitations for multiple perspectives, a place for your own story.

“Food remembers,” I once read on a pizza box. That’s true for art as well.

Mixed media on canvas.

Asking a meaningful question is more difficult than finding an answer. It is also far more rewarding and much more exciting.

Mixed Media on paper.

Space to breathe, space to see, space to think, space to love...Space is a fluid and essential element, just like water and air. Deeply personal, deeply political, deeply cultural, always essential.

Mixed media on paper.

You can’t surf the same wave twice but you can see it in more than 20 ways. I often record, document and produce work from multiple perspectives for just this reason. Capturing and embracing multiple perspectives expands our empathy and deeply enriches our experience.

Graphite and coffee on canvas.

The installation was held in the vault of an old warehouse where Burlington’s Karma Bird House Gallery is now located. For this installation, I converted the vault into an extension of my website, one that included a carpet made of live sod, a podium with cue cards, and a screen embedded into a white wall.

Physical presence and direct contact are lacking in the digital world. In this context, we easily forget that as human beings we always operate from our physical bodies, no matter how immersed we may be in the digital world. In this piece, I highlighted the issue by consciously connecting participants with the sense-rich physical world and with their bodies before drawing them into an interaction with the digital realm.

The sod-covered floor provided sensory contrast to the digital experience. People instinctively reached down to touch the grass. The installation lasted 10 days and as the grass changed from fresh to dry, the smell that filled the room also developed.

Lake Champlain is Burlington’s biggest resource but many people never get to the place where land and water meet. The possibilities at the edge are endlessly exciting. Marc Naud, director of the Sailing Center, and I believe that once people have a positive experience of a place they will develop a powerful sense of stewardship. With that purpose in mind, this performance pulled people and all their senses right to the edge of the lake.

The community sailing center is tucked away on the shoreline between the old Moran Power Plant, the Burlington Coastguard station and the public fishing pier. Not an easy place to find. You know you have reached the right spot when you see what looks like all of Burlington’s population standing in line to receive life jackets and to sign liability waivers.

You might imagine that they are signing up for a sailing lesson when in fact they are about to enter a performance. You put on the orange life jacket that hundreds of water-folks have worn before you, and feel the smell of adventure and excitement.

Now, the three main dancers arrive at the far edge of the dock, facing west, looking at the lake and the Adirondack Mountains, and begin lowering themselves into the water as the sun sets. The performance ends. You look around one more time, take it all in, and begin talking to the people next to you as you realize that you are in the liminal space between land and water, the figurative estuary of endless possibility and adventure.

For one night, in the space between old and new, approximately 200 people were called to “the employer’s office.” Inside, coffee cups, family photos and order forms on the desks generated the sense that the staff and their boss had just clocked out for the day and would be back at work the next morning. Like generations of Blodgett Oven employees, the audience was given safety instructions and asked to sign liability waivers before purchasing tickets. With the instructions heard and waivers signed, the doors to the Blodgett oven factory opened.

Imagine you are inside, peering down the factory’s dark cathedral-like center gallery, just like generations of workers had done until only a few weeks prior to the performance. The floor threatens with almost invisible metal splinters. A performer slowly pushes a light-filled trashcan toward you, as light beams and dancers begin to create moving sculptures. Eventually, the scupltures light a corridor for you to traverse. The sharp lines remind you of a laser cutting sheet metal - the first step in the manufacturing process.

Flashlights, like welding spots holding together the metal pieces that form the oven, provide lighting for a dance solo, then a duet. The dancers lead you down the aisle to the next scene. 11 dancers with 11 large safety mirrors start moving in synchronicity, reflecting back images of the audience and the large space around them. You have now arrived at the end of the production line. Just like the finished ovens, you are given a quality control card by one of the three collaborators, Craig, Erika or Miles. You exit at the loading dock.

Imagine that you lived in ancient Egypt when salt was traded as a precious commodity like oil and gold. Now return to the present and envision a huge salt storage shed in the unlit, almost unattended, no man’s land behind a parking lot.

Along with 159 other invited guests, you are guided to this place with a flashlight. As you approach, you hear a live saxophone. Suddenly, ten dancers appear on a gravel mountain situated next to the shed. The dancers come rolling down the mountain and guide you into the large metal shed.

You go deeper into the shed, arriving at the final scene where a video projection directs your eye to the massive mountain of salt. Dancers emerge and struggle toward the top never quite reaching the edges. A sudden shift in light and sound restores you to reality. You now realize you are in a principal storage site for road salt, an essential element of road maintenance and everyday life on the icy winter roads of Vermont.