For visual artists who work in multi-media collage, the term ephemera refers to a variety of written or printed artifacts that are often layered beneath paint, sketches or other material surfaces in order to create texture and visual interest in a piece of art. Defined as something short-lived and without lasting value, ephemera often include female-coded vintage items like magazine pages or church bulletins, hand-scrawled recipes passed down from someone’s grandmother, black and white photographs of women with bouffant hairdos and cigarettes standing in front of aluminum Christmas trees in the 1970s. The Sacred Ephemera series strives to complicate the notion of ephemerality, by intersecting my personal items– poems and journal pages describing old loves and losses, the insecurity and uncertainty of youth— with symbols of feminine power found inside myth. Through a process of collage, these ephemera are covered with paint and then sanded back through layers to uncover words and images, revealing personal truths as well as strong female characters like Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of war, or Akaste, the Greek river-nymph goddess associated with erratic streams and unpredictable rainfall. These figures are rendered in an abstract style which is surprising, evocative, and, like the ephemera they contain, elliptically beautiful. In this series, the fleeting emotion of ephemera is reconfigured into a permanent artifact, a palimpsestic portrait that connects self with culture, chronicles growth and celebrates the strength and maturity of women in midlife.

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