My fascination with public art began just after graduate school at the University of Washington with a temporary public art project sponsored by the city of Seattle titled "City Fare."  I found the experience to be both challenging and exciting requiring me to modify my process and concepts to conform to the site specificity and subject matter constraints of the project.  After moving to Florida, I continued my involvement with public art as a way to challenge and expand my creative research and art practice.  In my personal studio work I was involved with researching, combining and layering different forms of visual language systems.  Public art gave me the opportunity to be exposed to a myriad of new graphic language systems including, scientific, diagrammatic, and historically sourced images.  I found that these fascinating images could speak to the public art users and patrons in intimate  and meaningful ways.  I came to call my projects “user-specific” as well as site-specific.  Working with the budgets and requirements of these projects allowed me to expand my studio practice to employ new materials, production methods, and technologies prompting me to work in larger, sometimes monumental scales.

I became keenly aware that public art exposed my work to a different and varied audience.  I also continued to create and exhibit my "private or personal" artwork in museum and gallery venues.  I approached these two practices as separate but parallel.  I was speaking in a cohesive art vocabulary but employing different dialects with different responsibilities to these two different viewing audiences.