Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1958, I now live and work in Chicago, Illinois with my best friend Tim J. Smith, PhD, two dogs, and a bird named Freder. I received an MFA from the University of Chicago in 1994 after a 1990 BFA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas that includes a most intense art camp ever, the Yale Summer School of Art Norfolk, Connecticut Program.

Shortly after, I began teaching a full load of studio art classes and drive-through art-history / art-theory courses for adjunct pay at a college in Indiana. A couple of years after, my exhibitions schedule started filling out so I decide to give up all that and go full time studio in order to fulfill my exhibition commitments for the following year. Am still on that fast moving train.

I liked teaching, so I really enjoy the few opportunities I have had as visiting artist/lecturer. These include: Indiana University Purdue University in Ft. Wayne; Wayne State University in Detroit; Hyde Park Women’s Society in Chicago; mural class that focused on issues of public art held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; design classes at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago; University of Chicago; Portland State University; Elmhurst Art Museum; Northeastern Illinois University; Western Washington University; and Schmidt Art Center, Belleville, IL.

The best effect from showing regularly is that I get to talk to people with various backgrounds at every single opening. This perhaps is more educational for me than for them. Not only from their fresh and often deep insights into the work as filtered through their unique experience but also because the justification and explanation of the works in front of me that the questions of strangers solicit keep me honest and motivated to push, clarify, and explore.

My method of working is to develop an idea with a set of defined relationships, a story, and articulate it in the language of the sculpture material that I am using. Every material and technique has its own restricted, specific, unique way of stating verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. The translation from spoken language to a specific material language is the abstraction.

In general terms, my work’s conceptual purpose is to articulate narratives of identity in the language of crocheted fiberglass and to disintegrate and redefine expectations of a sculptural object by unraveling preconceptions of materials, forms, and categories in art.

I take opportunity where I can to include site-specific architectural challenges into the defined vocabulary that finds each new work. The more restrictions I have, the more specificity I can bring to the individual new form, the more it opens up to interpretation by a wider audience with varied backgrounds and experiences.