Artist Statement: Nature’s Will / RESILIENCY IN NATURE AND INNER NATURE

I have found reverie as well as inspiration in the natural environment. I am sure it is the “waitingness” of it, as well as the “beckoning ” of it, that captures me. The intense physicality in nature; the sheer will of its materials; a material will is what is most riveting.

The camera is a sketchbook, a daily journaling of glimpses, barely audible Sights, that are not articulate to consciousness.

Being an environmental activist, collecting natural objects, personal effects, and trash on beaches, roadsides, and National Parks, THE WORK is A constant recycling of personal history as well as environmental sludge.

From these archives, I mold memory into objects, then age them in the elements. A new natural history is born within the process. 

I find working three-dimensionally I have the most freedom, but also the most anxiety. I am forced by the use of a material, urethane foam that moves from liquid to solid quickly, to keep very much in the moment. Working with the urethane foam, I mold the pieces with my body so that the memory of my hands, limbs, and torso are seen in the work with the found environmental objects; the personal is molded with the found forming more intimate reverberations. The use of industrial materials causes change over time through sun exposure, similar to how our skin ages, reflecting the ravages of time.

Working with wax as a malleable surface, I use the casting process to find the miscast in a bronze pour.  The “mistake” casts the object in real-time, with real consequences having been decided.

Working with less malleable materials, the process focuses on line flow with the chosen material.  Juxtaposing disparate materials to create a resonance or dissonance depending on arrived at decision-making.

The process of printmaking, the repetition of an image, allows me to concatenate ideas.  Images are subsumed after many phases, the process is what I find most interesting and generative. Working an image/ object through many phases to evoke reverberations, the memory of the lost becomes palpable. The tenuous nature of life appears via these phases. Growth, degeneration, and transformation re-emerge as a natural progression. 

Background: American Diaspora; Born in Texas City, Texas, having lived in New York State, New York City, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, Ohio, Maine, Montana, Wisconsin, Arizona, San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Rosa, Japan, Italy…. my exposure to geography, climate, local attitude, and habit, I have digested a lot of exposure.

Traveled thru out the country photographing and after 9/11 traveled back to NYC to understand the trauma and loss.

I began the study of the woods of my youth… I made photogravure prints of a Revolutionary Battleground, Minisink documenting the delicate woodlands.

Ecological loss, SOLNASTALGIA, GRIEVING THE LOSS OF NATURE, A CONCEPT FROM “Mourning nature; Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss”, by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman.  Introduced me to the formal thought prevailing in our Climate Change movement.  I had been quite convinced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when I was 13.  

The changes daily: transience, transformation, and transcendence seen in the Death and rebirth around me daily was the reality of life.

This seeing, perception, is a focus of a lot of my thinking. I spend a lot of time studying neuroscience.  Most recently in an article by Jack Preston King “ We are Hallucinating All the Time”, the work of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, explains how the brain goes from experiential blindness, Blindspotting, to seeing a Simulation of what is not present in reality. That the brain is hallucinating is reality; many artists have used psychotropic Drugs to achieve states like this.  But perception keenly recorded achieves these states.

Whether one sees reality in abstract pattern or the reverse, the neuroscience reinforces this pneumonia WE are constantly NOT experiencing the real world. We are experiencing Our Brains’ best guess of what’s happening in the world.

Our realities are informed by our experience, past, present, and future.

Sometimes to quote Michael Pollan, “Normal waking consciousness feels transparent, YET, it is less a window on reality than a product of our Imagination- A KIND OF CONTROLLED HALLUCINATION”

THIS LEADS TO THE QUESTION; WHAT IS IT?

It is a thought-provoking question in art. We all have our individual perceptions informed by our experiences in the world.  We will name something based on our seeing or our blind spotting.

What I see while shooting or working in the process, is my experience of reality hoping to trigger another’s awareness.