I explore nature’s beauty and complexity through Abstraction. The work's deepest source is my early adult life in New Orleans and childhood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The verdant land, hurricanes, disappearing coastline, and the calm but potentially destructive water and wind formed my worldview.
In 1989 I moved to New Mexico, a spare, open, and vast landscape, beautiful and meditative but not always comforting. New Mexico is also a locus for experimentation in the arts, sciences, and spirituality. This includes Santa Fe as the second largest art market in the US; big science, in its two national laboratories and the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and the chaos theory thinktank The Santa Fe Institute; and diverse spiritual traditions including Native American, Buddhist, Hispanic Catholicism, and New Age. As quantum physics engages with ideas around the merging of matter and spirit, the nexus of these disparate subjects introduced me to how science resides alongside many spiritual traditions. Living among these ideas set the conditions for me to consider poeticized science and notions of transcendence in my work.
“Living near Los Alamos National Labs and Chaos Theory think tanks has led to a heightened interest in science, including systems, fractals, and strange attractors. In recent works, I examine ecology through intuitive mapping, finding my way in rapidly changing environments in the natural world through my art. I choose materials for their ability to be somewhat unpredictable or have the ability to change and therefore partner with me in making the work. This process circumvents preconceived ideas and opens me to new possibilities. I engage with the image and medium in a direct and intimate way. With encaustic printing, thought and action are one, much like improvisational music or dance.”
My current series, Koans, contemplates the role of carbon in life’s processes. These large encaustic monotypes use handmade paint, heavily pigmented with graphite, a mineral form of carbon. Wax with graphite is like crude oil when melted and fluid; nature meets industrial. The fluidity of the wax requires letting go while remaining mindful, its unpredictability necessitates invention and leads to an improvisational dance. The Koan works are carbon-laden, mysterious, dark, moody, almost mystical, a requiem for the earth. These images navigate interior territories- a medley of memory, images, hopes, and topography of self, carrying my childhood landscape forward in my mind. Their wild tangled impenetrable landscapes are my response to the rapidly changing environment. The solace I remember as a child in nature becomes solastalgic, as I consider carbon as fundamental to all life and yet, once industrialized, destructive to the planet.