ARTIST STATEMENT
My art practice stems from a place of grief and mourning. Through the loss of my beloved sister, I learned how deeply intertwined we are because without her, without the person my identity orbited around, I too was lost. This disorientation led me to seek out points of reference, namely the sun and the moon, to reroot myself as clock-time had lost its meaning and I was led to thoughts of despair as I contemplated the minutes, days and years since our separation. It was through the steady presence & reliable cycles of these celestial bodies that I was able to remember the circular nature of time and find what Adrienne Rich calls the “corporeal ground of our intelligence”.
My art practice represents my own healing journey but also taps into collective healing and universal truths. I use photography, drawing, video, words, ritual, installation and my own body to express what it means to be alive at this precipitous moment. My work is an act of resistance against an increasingly virtual, destructive and disembodied world.
Through creation, I alchemize my pain into hope and offer a new future, one in which we are reconnected to Mother Earth and through ritual and acts of deep presence and witnessing, we remember our oneness. My goal is to show the sacredness of all beings including the earth herself. I use the camera as a portal into the eternal now and honor the subject’s life force with my total attention, which is to say, love. My portraits of trees, of humans, of animals and stones, are acts of devotion to life itself.
With sunprints and lunar photograms, I collaborate with the sun and the moon and deepen my relationship to the cosmos. I work with living plant matter and crystals, harnessing and infusing light-sensitive paper with the healing energy of these materials. My stone circles and shell spirals are offerings to the earth in gratitude for her generosity. They seek to answer the questions: How do you communicate with something that doesn’t speak in human tongue? How do you give back after taking for so long? Each creation is a way of giving thanks, of demonstrating the significance and necessity of reciprocity, of communion. It is one step closer to coming home.
My practice taps into a primordial remembering of how to speak directly with the earth and its beings, one carried across millennia by indigenous people around the world and it is with deep respect that I draw attention to this lineage, to my own long lost ancestors, and to the First Peoples of the land upon which I now live.