ARTIST STATEMENT
My art practice stems from the rich soil of processed grief and carefully tended mourning. Through the loss of my beloved sister, I learned how enmeshed we are because without her, without the person my identity orbited around, I too became lost. This disorientation led me to seek out points of reference, namely the sun and the moon, to reroot myself as clocktime had lost its meaning. 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 is the toil and fruit of my own healing journey, and while deeply personal, 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 of imminent climate collapse. My work is an act of resistance against an increasingly virtual, destructive and disembodied world and seeks to offer a new future, one in which we are reconnected to the land and through deep presence, we remember our oneness. 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 and communion.
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. I am also indebted to the writings of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, David Abram, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Blackie and John O’Donohue; and my teachers Jane Sanguinetti, Kate Miller, Staci Boden, Joshua Schrei, Eve Bradford, Jocelyn Lee, Angela Hennessy and Deborah Valoma.