During my childhood and youth growing up in Europe, I always loved working creatively with my hands. But my first professional choice was to become a physician. After completing medical school, I relocated to the United States with my husband and two children. Here I was drawn back to the love for art and pursued a new, and for me, more fulfilling career, by obtaining a teaching degree in art from California State University, Stanislaus. During the ensuing years, while teaching art fulltime in New Jersey, I continued taking courses in clay, fiber and metal at Tyler School of Art, University of the Arts, the Clay Studio and Perkins Center for the Arts. Over the summer months, I studied at Penland, Haystack and Peters Valley, where I had the distinguished pleasure of working under Paulus Berensohn and Jimmy Clark.

My work has been on display at the Public Library in Danbury, Brookfield Craft Center and the Silver Mine Guild, all in Connecticut, at California State University, Rowan University, Perkins Center for the Arts, Hopkins House, Burlington County College and a three-person show at the Clay College in Millville, New Jersey.

All of my pieces are hand-built --- slab, coil or pinch, the latter being my most frequent choice. I enjoy the direct contact between my hands and the clay.

Pinching represents for me the most natural and direct way of working with clay. I treasure the intimate spontaneity of this technique, since I like to observe the clay and see what it might suggest when I take a piece of it into my hands. Often there are grooves, ridges and textures which dictate the shape of the pot I am about to make.

On the other hand, some of my pieces resemble forms from nature and show a connectedness to the earth. Sometimes I have the image of a seed pod in mind, a stone, a flower or any other intriguing organic shape. I then pursue that idea until it leads to a visually pleasing form with an expression of its own. Usually I don't have a definite concept of the finished piece when I begin --- I rather try to remain receptive to coincidental changes of the form as it develops, so that I might preserve a sense of spontaneous, free-form gesture.

And finally the firing: The ancient Raku method, with its close encounter of flame and smoke and the ensuing unpredictable color magic of these elements on the clay surface, never ceases to intrigue and excite me.