Room-sized mixed-media installation

As part of my on-going use of words and text as inspiration for my visual arts projects, I chose to work with the word GRACE. It took me several years to identify a form that would convey the many meanings the word implies. Where was the one object, I asked myself, that could suggest movement, a prayer, a name, a state of being? When I was given a 1950s-style chiffon hostess apron, purchased from a church bazaar sale as a gag gift, I knew I had found what I'd been looking for.

What could be more fitting for a GRACE project than an object with long graceful ribbon-like ties, with a connection to the meals over which grace is said, which may even have been worn by a gracious southern lady named Grace? What actually clinched the use of the apron as my form, though, was the fact that this prototype, this apron I'd been given, had been lightly scorched when it had been ironed .... its perfection was slightly flawed .... it was itself a candidate for GRACE, that state of unconditional love and forgiveness.

The GRACE project was eventually installed at the Castellani Art Museum on the campus of Niagara University, where it resided from March through May, 2002.

 Given a gallery of its own where light and sound from the rest of the museum was diminished by a title wall, the piece welcomed the viewer into a hushed and darkened environment where the soft shadows of 52 hanging aprons danced across the walls.

The wired aprons took on many characteristics .... at once becoming birds, ghosts of mom in the kitchen, angels, "flying nuns", or beautiful laundry waving in the breeze. The mystical experience was heightened by a CD, the sound track of which wafted overhead and contained the sound bites of everything from whispered "amen"s to Elvis singing "Amazing Grace" to George Burns saying goodnight to Gracie.

The piece was again installed from July to September of 2004, in Rochester, NY, as part of the Memorial  Art Gallery's "1st Rochester Biennial Exhibition", an invitational show of the work of six upstate New York Artists.