Free-hand drawn calligraphic shapes fill her square canvases, creating groups in orderly rows or forming tangles of intersecting lines. The patterns often remind the artist of fiber weaves seen under a microscope. Once a freelance fashion illustrator for designer Fiandaca, Carter left the fashion world to pursue an art career, ultimately earning an M.F.A. in painting from UMass Dartmouth. Her love of textiles, however, has remained part of her art. Many of her works are collages of swirl-painted fabric shapes -- squares, circles, ovals -- glued to a canvas, creating a pattern that juxtaposes the spontaneity of the churning lines with the regimentation of the repeated forms.

Carter begins her art by creating a stencil. Sometimes she sees a pleasing pattern of crossing lines in such simple objects as a dining-room trivet, but more often, she creates the lines herself in a free-form handwriting on paper. She then cuts out the stencils, arranges them in two or three overlapping loops and places them on a canvas, which she has toned with a base coat of white or black paint. Next, she spray paints the entire canvas with the contrasting color. When the stencils are removed, the base coat comes through and the swirling lines take on a vitality that belies their mundane origins. There is a contained energy that emanates from her artwork as if the images are coiled springs about to jump off the canvas.

Her copy-editing experience also had a philosophical impact on Carter's art. She claims, "There is a special atmosphere at a newspaper." She soon realized that "the individual was important to the whole," and while her job didn't come with an impressive title like managing editor, it was nonetheless essential to the overall success of the production.

Carter seeks to transfer that feeling of individual components combining to form a significant whole. She wanted her art to be a "reflection of social fabric." From this ideological approach, her collages take shape. Carter arranges pieces of painted fabric evenly on the canvas purposely so that there is no central focus. The eye travels across, up and down her canvas, taking in the individual pieces and seeing the whole without fixing on any one element. She refers to Andy Warhol's multiples of Marilyn Monroe's lips that transform the recognizable into an abstraction. Her collages, likewise, combine the randomness of the lines on the individual squares of fabric with the repetition of evenly spaced, similar shapes that create an abstract whole.

Her inspiration for "Rattan," a large square canvas made up of smaller squares of fabric on which bamboo-like lines radiate like spokes, was a Japanese pottery plate. What Carter especially likes about this painting is the way the paint tends to blob at certain points. When she began the work, she was concentrating on the interaction of spray paint on fabric. However, in the process of painting on a thin, curtain-like material, she found the paint penetrated the fabric and began to pool on the plastic sheeting she had laid beneath the material to protect the hardwood floors of her studio. Those random effects are what make the piece so interesting. Carter feels these unplanned-for happenings are "an important part of the process." She loves to see the faded, soft, charcoal-like edges that occur when the stencil begins to curl and the paint creeps underneath, the ragged edges that form when the stencil tears, or the subtle blobs of paint that appear when the stencil is pulled off the canvas. "They're my favorite part," she says, adding, "You can't plan these effects."

Carter also enjoys experimenting with the impact of the shapes, whether they are dissected and reassembled into a collage, arranged in two or three rows on 20, 28, or 44-inch squares, take up the entire surface of the painting, or extend beyond the boundaries of the canvas. Furthermore, Carter believes that by eliminating or limiting color, both the artist and the viewer can concentrate on the shapes and composition of the art work.

In the series of paintings entitled "Tangles," she abandons the fabric collage technique, but maintains the overall focus, or more accurately the lack of a focal point. What Carter has done, in this series, is to concentrate on a single component of a collage, and to create a canvas that resembles a close-up version of one of its ovals. The lines and loops overlap and extend off the edges of the square canvas, as if the viewer is looking into the center of a tangle of knotted ropes or twisted yarn. As the eye follows the lines around and through each other, the viewer experiences the whole canvas. The confusion of positive and negative spaces sets up a tension that is not present in the controlled order of the collages, despite their randomly painted parts.

Her latest series of four sets of two canvases involves loosely formed mirror images of tightly arranged loops, half in black on white, half reversed. "Even though the elements are the same," says Carter, "they evoke a different feeling."