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ARTISTS BOOKS During my thirty-year career as an artist, I have translated my ideas into a variety of media -- photography, books, installation, video, sculpture and public artwork. Besides photomontage, the common thread through all of my work can be seen as a kind of visual archaeology: the work begins by exploring the world through research and scientific observation and continues challenging the viewer to find the meaning by delving into the work, as I do in finding my material. I am, first and foremost, a collector, constantly acquiring images from books and magazines, and various kinds of ephemera, usually with no idea of where or when they might find their way into my artworks. The times in which they were printed or created become powerful elements as they are juxtaposed with one another. Old magazines, encyclopedias, books, maps, dollhouse furniture and bric-a-brac found in boxes at flea markets, yard sales, and used book stores -- have come to form the archive materials used in my photomontage-based work. My resulting images address issues of daily life and personal memory about the larger forces of the universe and human history. I have been making artists books for more than twenty years, and have produced over seventy -- some one-of-a-kind, others in limited edition. I began to make books, because I was interested in the ways in which the viewer's response to this medium differed from that of painting and printmaking, which were my previous media to this point. I wanted to use the way that we accept knowledge as "deep", and information "important" from a book; the way that memory is created over pages (time) in a book; and the feelings that we bring to books from our childhood. My bookworks began as collages in pages reminiscent of scrapbooks. Over time the collages became increasingly photographic - the images blending almost seamlessly, though surrealistically. In more recent years I have been working on "altered books" (artists books made from previously-existing books), that are more sculpture than two-dimensional. The hundreds of pages in these books have been glued together to make only two or three double-page spreads, and they may contain objects and doorways. Over the years, through the use of new technologies, such as the higher speed computers with greater amounts of memory and electrostatic printing, the recycling and recontextualizing of material has taken on new dimensions for me, thus increasing even further the potential of new audiences for my work.