The tree is a beautiful, powerful image, a symbol of strength, stability, endurance, life and growth. It is anchored in the earth with its roots and reaches for the heavens with its branches. Trees are givers of life. They provide us with beauty, food, shade, shelter, wood, and oxygen as well as a place to play or ponder. Trees cluster together to form mysterious sacred spaces. They can live for hundreds of years and grow into giants. When forests are consumed by fire, they eventually are reborn with new growth and new life.

I have always loved trees and have used tree imagery in my work on and off since childhood. I have vivid memories of Barbey Street, where I grew up in Brooklyn, lined with maple trees that canopied the street. I loved seeing those trees draped in snow in the wintertime; rustling through their leaves in the fall; pelting friends with the "itchy balls" they shed; and adorning my face with "polly- noses" in the spring. Two red berried holly trees and a very tall evergreen were my favorite trees in our backyard. Under them birds flittered about in a small rock garden which encircled a bird bath with a Madonna in it, creating our own sacred space.

Highland Park, where I "hung out" as a young teenager, was filled with a great variety of old trees. I would lie on my back on top of a picnic table and day dream up into the canopy of trees wondering how to draw them from that view.

In 1972 my family moved to Florida. At first I missed the northern trees and the Florida landscape seemed barren and bleak to me. Now I see the same subtropical surroundings as lush and beautiful.

For over twenty years, I have lived in an old, heavily treed neighborhood in Ft. Lauderdale called River Oaks. In 2004 and 2005 Ft. Lauderdale suffered an overwhelming loss of its tree canopy which has dramatically altered the visual character of my neighborhood and the city.

Since Hurricane Wilma crippled the tri-county area in 2005, everywhere I go in South Florida, I miss the trees. I miss the trees at work, along the expressway, and in parks, cemeteries and other public spaces but most of all I miss the trees in my neighborhood, on my street and in my own backyard. I think of my Tree Totems and Tree Drawings as offerings to and celebrations of the many trees I have been missing that were devastated by hurricanes and tropical storms in the past few years.

Tree Totems was my first body of claywork during my sabbatical, prior to which I had worked on large scale projects for the previous six years. The Tree Totems were a natural follow-up to the totems initiated in the Grandma's Treasures assemblage series also made during my sabbatical. Five natural clay colors: white, ochre, peach, medium brown and dark brown are used in various patterns and combinations to define archetypal images such as trees, cups, houses, birds, and ladders in playfully stacked totems.

The Tree Drawings are actual portraits of specific trees in my neighborhood, River Oaks, drawn on clay from photographs taken on spring break in March of 2002. Before I started the tree drawings, I located each tree in the neighborhood, noted its address and identified its species. It was interesting to see how the trees had changed in four years: a few had grown significantly, most of them had been severely deformed by the storms and several did not survive at all.