about:
I am a writer and collage artist based in Reno, Nevada.
My collage art has roots in my desire to tell a good story, particularly my fascination with writing lyrical nonfiction essays. The practice of weaving autobiography with other sources—the daily news, poetry, scientific fact, anything, really—is a process that demonstrates the power of form. Through this practice, I have learned that stories grow to inhabit a size and shape that best serves them— that organizes the content, deepening the logic of the world they themselves create.
Like lyrical nonfiction writing, my work in mixed media collage contains multiple sources- wood from felled trees I happen across, flowers, fabric, images, the written word, and thread—materials that have long been used in the construction of the homes in which we live, that decorate our hearths, that hold together the clothes we wear— the things we either take with us or leave behind. The relics and resonances of our lives, either infused with memory or bereft of it.
Eight years after I received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California—-where I practiced and honed the lyrical essay— I came across the theories of Maori psychotherapist David Grove. In particular, his insight that space itself is a carrier of meaning struck me as insightful. However, exploring physical space is not something that lends itself easily to written narratives or even to lyrical essays. To explore space, you have to move around in it. Collage has enabled me to translate my essays into physical realities where this kind of exploration is possible.
My collage is a visual expression—the physical form—of my essays. Sourced from found objects, my work explores the intersection of what is (perhaps) mythical, autobiographical, contextual, and current—what is past, present, and what could or could not be. Wishes, prophecies, curses— the conceptual and often metaphorical landscape attempts to reach the intangible through the wood, paper, thread, fabric, and written word from which it is comprised.
My paternal grandmother was a prolific painter of landscapes and portraits— she was drawn to scenes from the Sierra Nevada, and painted the portraits of mothers with their children. Although her medium of choice was oil on canvas, her studio was peppered with her collage—an art-making method that allowed her to explore possibilities for the compositions that would later be rendered on canvas. My collage practice did not begin until well after my writing career established itself. Yet, working in this way has felt like a homecoming, a return to the source of the inspiration for both my art and my writing.
Through these pieces, the juxtaposition of unlikely materials, ideas, and visual cues sparks a new dialogue, a new narrative, a new possibility. Through the invitation of ideas to transform into objects, and to occupy space, I call upon our human need to experience the unexpected—and to join in the act of creation inviting the imagination to play and to ask “Could this be?”
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I am the author of the 2018 bestselling memoir A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America’s First Mental Health Court by Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren. She is also the ghostwriter for the 2013 memoir Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt by Kevin Hines.
My essays have appeared in Nevada Magazine, The Transformational Power of Arts Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, Stereo Embers Magazine, The Meadow, Hotel Amerika, TAYO Literary Journal, and Weber: The Contemporary West.
Although I have always considered myself an artist (you’ll often find me painting, drawing, and otherwise making a mess in my house), I started seriously practicing and exploring my collage practice in 2021.. Inspired by the process of lyrical essay-making, of symbolic modeling (a kind of therapeutic facilitation I began practicing during the pandemic), I discovered I could say things with collage when my essays failed me. By layering and juxtaposing objects, I often discover that my assumptions about the world are challenged—sometimes reaffirmed, sometimes, not.
Collage, in many ways, is a process of exploration. Although I come to my art-making process with serious questions and concepts, I am always struck by the playfulness (the stamp of creative energy) that I find as a residue of this particular process. Perhaps this is what keeps me coming back to collage again and again.
And here is some ancient history: I have a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction writing awarded by Saint Mary’s College of California and two Master of Arts degrees in English and Foreign Languages and Literatures (with an emphasis on French) awarded by the University of Nevada, Reno.
When I’m not being creative, athletic, or literary, I am a mom to four cats, nine chickens, and a giant white dog.
<3, R