My work arises from a combination of activist responses to daily life and devotional methodology. The context of interdepence is important in realizing my projects: I emphasize the use of found, recycled and re-purposed materials; and in my installations I intentionally create situations whose finished form and meaning depend on viewer participation. Such artists as Natalie Jeremijenko, Mierle Ukeles, Rikrit Tirivanija, and Gu Wenda are inspirations to me for their humor, transnational activism, and purposeful appropriation a wide variety of materials.

I don't like to call myself or my work "spiritual," but my experiences as a long-time Buddhist practitioner and one-time nun are strong influences. There is a Zen story in which a student asks a dying teacher what to do to honor that teacher’s memory. The teacher answers, “Build me a seamless monument.” Meaning: live in such a way that “sacred” and “ordinary” are one. Playing on this possibility, I apply the methodology and aesthetics of the sacred to the ordinary, and vice versa. For example, in the first phase of the 100 Names Project (2002) I used site-specific shrines and maps to create a walking pilgrimage linking dozens of spaces in downtown Atlanta , wherein participants engaged their city, its contrasts, and its multi-national inhabitants with newfound attention.

My interest in devotional sites takes root in two major pilgrimage experiences. In 1991, I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain , following a traditional route to the shrine of St. James in Santiago de Compostela. Two years later, I was awarded the Chase Coggins Memorial Fellowship to photograph the 88-temple Shikoku Island pilgrimage in Japan. Sites along these routes showed me how thousands of handprints can dig gouges into the stone of a cathedral, how grape soda can be an offering, and how participation in a shared, sequential matrix of gestures can be a catalyst for transformation.

Re-casting traditional devotional practices into contemporary situations keeps the traditions relevant and offers a rich vocabulary for expressing activist impulses. I like to tread a fine line between reverence and play, and so the recipes for my installations sound like this:

• During an election year, question the deadly polarization of political display by staging elaborate street processions around Vashita the Sacred Cow.
• For the Names of God in a litany, or the deities in a sand mandala, substitute actual names of those being born and dying, in the city, every day. (100 Names Project Phase II, 2002)
• Use a crisis in urban green spaces as a starting point for growing acorns into trees for re-planting, and then as a catalyst for written reflections on the paradoxical nature of nurture. (Becoming the City that Planted Trees, 2003 & Becoming Aware of a Paradox in Nurture, 2004)
• Be literal about utopian longing for A Better Place , and suggest alternatives to the blight of untended investment real estate. Apply these as vinyl letters on the windows of derelict, empty shops. (Coming Soon, 2002)
• Invoke the oracular possibilities of the Internet, using search-engine results as raw material for multi-layered Internet Mandalas of participants’ chosen texts. (Internet Mandala Project, 2003)
• Take the story of the god Indra’s magic net of stars, and invite participants to make a net of their own, linking themselves to one another in a giant cat’s cradle tracing personal relationships. (Finding Indra’s Net, 2004)

Alongside major installation projects, I continue to work as a painter, a book artist, and a photographer, understanding that the seeds of my ideas are watered through these deliberate ways of recording and invoking the world.