About

My work begins in the steps I take over the earth.  I walk, I observe, I gather.  The drawings, mixed media arrangements, poems and short films that grow out of these practices are translations rather than documentation.  They are narrative unfoldings or poetic responses to a cultivated practice of walking, currently, through the forests of New England.  The bits of natural and human-made forms I find accumulate into a visual alphabet.  Lichen, shells, glass, leaves, bones, branches, bits of rusted metal, seaweed, and sprouting vegetable scraps are combined, obscured, or re-arranged through both analog and digital methods.  Some are photographed as a shadow through a screen, moving them into another world-space.  Other collected phenomena are recorded with a camera just as they are, to glimpse a moment of their changing surface.  Other elements are translated through drawing.  The pieces coalesce into the story of a larger whole.

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The imagery complicates distance and scale, reflecting on the layered and expansive nature of reality.  Distinctions between forms are often undefined.  Edges oscillate between sharper points of focus and dissolved boundaries which further interweave the relationship between subjects.  I focus my attention on the small, the overlooked and open out to the broad, the overwhelming.  This practice asks me to pause, reflect, and question the solidity of my view. It is an attempt to widen my understanding of other beings and other ways, expanding my circle of empathy ever outward from the central hub of my own experience.  Images, films, and words become the means to weave together fragments of thought and fragments of place.  I mean to embrace visual narrative as a vehicle for connection.

 

This work is intended for any person who longs to suspend judgement and walk in silence long enough to delight in the wonder of other beings, other ways, other kinds of intelligence, and in the knowledge that each of yet us knows very little.