My journey as an artist began during my childhood in Northern California, where I loved to create constructions on the beach from sand, rocks, and seaweed. I thought of these as "sand castles" rather than art. When I went to the mountains, I made "snow forts," snow arches, and snowball creations that I did not think of as art either.

I'm thankful that during a high school ceramics class, I was given the freedom to experiment at length with the clay. I spent quite a few classes folding up flat slabs of clay and then slicing the resulting bundle with a long wire. The results looked like the underground layers that are revealed where a road or river cuts through the earth. I spent one class dropping balls of clay down the six-story stairwell of my school onto a "target" of clay. I thought of my work in this class mainly as exploration and discovery, and only partly as art. This duality in my art practice has continued to the present.

As an adult, I enjoyed making sculpture from wire, aluminum foil, clay, and increasingly, in nature. I was driven by a desire to connect more intimately with nature and to create works that conveyed the beauty and the uncertainty in the world. Since 2000, all my work has been made with natural materials.

In 2003, I started taking photographs of my sculpture and exhibiting as a professional artist. I also began leading group art-making events devoted to imparting a sense of discovered knowledge, releasing creative energy, arousing a sense of delight in nature, and inspiring collective action on behalf of the environment.