About Valerie

I like making things. And I like getting older and feeling less self-conscious about the things I make. Small scale metal smithing has become my favorite but I also like ceramics and printmaking and fiber arts. 

I like the natural world. Even when I was little, I liked to wander in the woods and on our farmland, and tuck things in my pockets: rocks and rusty metal and small animal bones. I grew up in Minnesota, land of lakes and rivers and plentiful agates, which proliferated in tubs and bowls around my childhood bedroom. On a (rare) family trip to northern Minnesota, my mom somehow agreed to let me bring home a five-gallon bucket full of iron ore, which lived in my closet for years. Much later, as an adult living in San Francisco, I tried to convince my partner to meet me at the beach in the middle of a work day to haul three connected whale vertebrae up the hill and home (he didn’t agree, but to his credit, they were heavy, smelly, and rotting. And we didn’t have a way to haul them up the steep hill. Or a vehicle that they would fit in. Or a yard in which they could rot.)

I like the simple surprises found in nature, like a pink mushroom in a brown fall forest; the sounds a frozen lake makes late at night when all is quiet; seed pods in all their forms; a fallen tree that forms a bridge; the smell of dog paws. 

I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan with my partner, three awesome kids, and two wild dogs.