Denise has a profound love of the Irish landscape, a theme that is central to her quilting.

For strength and inspiration she draws on the closeness of her family and her love of nature. Denise grew up in a large family in the San Francisco Bay Area. She presently lives near Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and son. She is inspired by the intensely colored Colorado skies and the beautiful foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Denise’s quilts are most typically images of Irish megalithic stones and landscapes – dolmens, cairns, burial chambers, stone circles, standing stones, ancient stone churches and monasteries, forgotten cemeteries and gravestones, Celtic crosses, and the like. Irish “stone hunting” is also a great excuse for having to make repeated trips back to her family’s ancestral homeland.

To best express the moods and textures inherent in these complex landscapes, Denise uses a wide variety of colors, fabrics, and threads. She custom hand paints and quilts each stone to achieve the most realistic look possible, whereas the more abstract landscapes are created using a stripping technique that uniquely mimics the intimacy, shadowing, and tones and hues so common to Irish vistas.

Denise received an Associate of Arts Degree from College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California. She has been juried into numerous international shows including Quilt National, Expressions: The Art Quilt, Artist as Quiltmaker, and others, winning several Best of Shows, and has had several solo shows as well.

Denise also makes commissioned quilts of other people’s sacred locations.