My stories are told through my materials; collector treasures of antique handspun, handwoven linen, artistic hand-dyed threads from “The Thread Gatherer”, and the exceptional original drawings of Erich Ballinger and Carmen Ramirez. For the past 20 years, I’ve been showing my work at artistic textile fairs and exhibitions within Austria and Germany.

I was an art student at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, now the California Institute of the Arts, in 1965. At the same time, I was working as a salesperson in a department store and had shared with my mother how bored I was at work. Her response was a package in which were threads, a needle, and a piece of fabric with a preprinted pattern on it. She thought I might teach myself how to stitch during the breaks at work. In this way, my mom became “Ariadne’s Red Thread” in my life. 

I met my husband, Erich Ballinger, a European from Graz, Austria in Los Angeles in 1967. In 1970 we moved to Austria. We lived in the countryside in west Styria which was like fifty years behind the times of the world that I had come from and grown up in. It has been exactly this immense challenge, throughout all these years that has brought me to my very own way, as I like to say, to paint across the fabric.