I investigate the human condition and the material world by examining the tangled connections of people and things. I seek patterns, often through counting sherds or words, but always interrogating evidence and seeking meanings. I am avowedly interdisciplinary through training and practice. My teaching seldom comes from a textbook, but is often built on fieldwork, observing, making and doing. In all, I delight in the wonder and excitement of the decorative arts, where beauty and utility are created within a marketplace of the lives of makers and users and revel in the power of objects to tell us about lives in the past and our own.

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