This series is the culmination of eight years of work that began in 1997 with two hundred small gouache paintings on paper. I worked in a studio in West Marin, by the ocean. My intention was to tap into the unconscious, stay open, and create a body of work through automatism. The technique was first used by Surrealist painters and poets to express the creative force of the unconscious in art. The work required letting go of expectations and judgments in order to open myself to dynamic energy flow and to clear my mind. It was a freeing experience.

In 2005 I began to document the series I called Automatism, and discovered the repetition of certain shapes emerging over time. There were eight distinct groups of similar imagery, each group seeming to symbolize a specific state of consciousness or a particular emotion. I chose one image from each group, explored the effects of scale, and greatly enlarged the most emblematic pieces on fabric banners to install in the Fort Apache space, working with Anne Hege.

An original sound track and headphones accompanied each piece, and forms were available on which viewers could record their reactions. The installation asked: Can my core emotion evoke the same feeling in the viewer? Can individuals connect at that core level through art intention? Viewer responses supported the affirmative.