Through explorations of the landscape genre, my work considers human interventions and interpretations of the natural world. I engage in a field-based practice to create site-responsive projects through a tactile connection to place, collecting specimens, field notes, and drawing on site. Finished works translate these experiences into altered topographies, visual meditations on the progression of time, and metaphorical interpretations of ecological systems. My recent work explores the passage of time from the geological perspective of a petrified tree on a hilltop in Wyoming.
The writings within these works contain my thoughts and observations while working on-site, and with the drawings of tree, offer a visual meditation on both transience and persistence.
The Petrified series considers time as a subject, with segments of a petrified tree trunk appearing as artifacts of another epoch. Trees keep count of their years, and while these rings remain hidden while the tree grows, even a living tree experiences a pace of life entirely different than my own, as its existence may stretch across many generations of humanity. The world that produced and preserved a giant tree is long gone, but the tree, or at least its form in stone, endures.
Petrified: A Tree
2015, lithograph, 11 x 15 inches
Petrified: Confessions
2015, lithograph, 11 x 15 inches
Petrified: Time
2015, lithograph, 11 x 15 inches