Arts, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions for Beaconsfield and at UCSB. Work and reception Mulfinger has worked with a wide range of materials, media and strategies; her approach has been likened to "an alchemist [who] turns the mundane and banal into something extraordinary." Critics such as Sacha Craddock suggest that a key strategy in her work involves putting everyday found objects and photographs—characterized by John Stathatos as "burdened with a haunting familiarity"—into disquieting or unfamiliar contexts and relationships in order to enable viewers to re-encounter them. Installation works Mulfinger's early work probed collective experience, memory and history through found objects, images and interventions in architectural space. In installations such as Norris, R.E. and Rhoberts I (both 1989), she transformed exhibition spaces into sites of contemplation and optical effects by sewing locally collected, discarded clothing into tarpaulins that were fit over skylights, creating multi-colored panels resembling cathedral stained glass. Beneath them, she altered the environments by painting walls, covering windows in fabric, and adding continuous benches or chairs. She sometimes projected images of seated individuals from different historical periods onto the benches. Writers suggested that the work connected viewers to a cycle of life, death, presence and absence. Curator Kate Bush wrote, "unfolding through the passage of time, recuperable through memory, and incarnate in the objects we leave behind". In related works, Mulfinger explored monochromatic effects (the all-blue Deluge, 1990), geographies, source materials and media. For Caught in Passing (1994)—done in residency at the New York Experimental Glass Workshop—she cast 22 pairs of rejected shoes from Salvation Army thrift stores in crystal, reconstituting the abject discards into an homage to unknown lives that The Independent (London) called a "beautifully surreal" work of "ghostly translucence." The installation I Battuti Bianchi ("The White Flagellants," 1991) referenced the symbolic gowns of a historical sect in Carignano, Italy by sewing white, second-hand clothing into a hot air balloon-like structure housed in the town basilica, creating a cluster of associations around sacred and profane garments and the human desire for ascendance, through science and spirituality. For Armory as Cathedral, Beyond the Visible Spectrum (2002), Mulfinger covered the outside of two 45' x 7' skylights with tarpaulins of sewn garments facing the same direction, one red and one blue. Set at a former armory (now the Armory Center for the Arts), and exposed to wind and weather, the iconically color-coded panels