About Me

Born in Australia, Barbara has lived in 11 countries, including France, where she studied Design and Photography at ESAG Penninghen in Paris for five years, enduring the événements de mai (not her fault, she arrived in the middle) and where, after graduating as Lauréate, she worked in Switzerland for Huguenin for two years designing medals, some for the Olympic Games in Munich, which ended in a disastrous terror attack, but it wasn’t her fault. She did the Hippie Trail solo, like all well-behaved girls of that era, and ended up in Iran where she met her husband Hugh and worked for Bell Helicopter as a technical illustrator for five years, which also ended in disaster with the Iranian Revolution, but again not her fault. She and her husband worked as foreign experts (a Chinese term for teaching English 72 hours a week for $50 a month), based in Wuhan when it was just another city on the Yangtze River (and the Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t even exist, so definitely not her fault for what happened there). She gave art workshops to high-school students in Germany where nothing much happened except the Wall between East and West Germany was finally broken, before settling in the United States.

Where she collected 431 cosmic items from the local thrift stores.

These originated from all over the world and included a shrunken head from the Amazon rainforest, a fertility goddess from Africa, a Bird-Man deity from North America, and a rainbow serpent from Australia, probably all of them rejects from long-ago tourist trips, for the fact that they were sold in thrift stores tells its own sad tale. Barbara, kindness itself except to the squirrels who dug out her bulbs every Spring, and — oh yes, the neighbor who fed those same squirrels — felt sorry for the rejects and bought them by the bucket load. Some had been crying with shame at the remarks passed about them by jocular shoppers (“Looks like my aunt when she’s drunk”), some had been on the shelves for years and had given up hope of ever finding a nice home. Barbara soothed their wounded psyches, telling them she would build a Shrine for them, neglecting to mention it was only a storeroom in her basement. However, they were happy enough when she placed them there — shamans, gods, fetishes, every sacred, esoteric and occult item you can think of — with a few of her own creations when she wanted a particularly hard-to-find god. They dried their tears as she placed them in their sections that ranged from Charms to Ancient Egypt to Oceania and began to feel at home (some of them too much at home if truth be told).

She took their photos as they came in, for she had decided to create a picture and bio for each and every one of them.

And she did.