Her unique moniker, “Church Goin’ Mule,” is a tribute to her ancestry and her deep admiration for the mighty mule. Both of her grandfathers were Appalachian men: one served in WWII and farmed with mules, and the other preached for the Methodist Ministry. Their legacy, along with her own garden, is a significant source of inspiration for her art.

Mule’s work is a memory jug that mashes the collective Southern past into creative present, she paints song & story, lore & loss. The sermons of the past and the potency of the present stir her. She is an outsider artist through and through, typically painting on wood and numbering her works as well as marking them with locations and dates.

She honors the mule as our common ground. He has always been there; able to work harder, live longer, and eat less than other beasts of burden. He stood beside all: moonshiners, levee builders, cotton farmers, timber-haulers, oil drillers, sugar cane men. He worked six days and brought his folks to church and town on the seventh. Stories and poems, jokes and songs became prolific about the south’s four-legged machine. Church Goin’ Mule’s work holds all this legacy with love and reverence