If a Tree Falls

Death is the great reshaper of matter in the natural world — never created, never destroyed, only transformed. We are entangled in landscapes and relationships in ways that persist after death, forever tracing each other’s pilgrimage through the physical universe. I engage grief as a framework for renewed relationships with the local landscape, where death and decomposition become technologies which tend to the polytemporal mingling of humans, land, and matter. The forms I create evoke sacred and organic structures such as icons, bark, columns, trees, spires, stalagmites, spirals, and halos. They shift between sculpture and installation, channeling light, filtering air, and reacting to movement.  

I work with copper, silk, carbon, recycled paper, mirrors, found detritus, and foraged plant materials to create portraits of grief. Time and touch become another material in the studio as I collect, process, and recycle materials; my touch transforming the material, and the material transforming my touch. Leaves from the farm I compost with are harvested, dried, and stored for ecoprinting; catalogs and magazines are collected from neighbors and friends for paper recycling. Within my studio, nothing has a fixed function; objects and tools are recognized for their diverse material properties — permeable, waterproof, heavy, transparent; everything perennially composes, decomposes, and recomposes by my hand. 

My work invites a rewilding of our relationships with mortality and local landscape. It dares to believe that something known, cherished, and lost, can be traced through its rebecoming with acts of attention, material transformation, and contemplative hope.