ABOUT THESE COLLECTIONS…
This current body of work reflects a year of life and death - of cycles beginning, ending, shifting, and cycling, of intense introspection and perception.
Each of us have lived through a shared global experience this past two years, each with our own unique ways and stories. My personal experience had two dominant threads – caring for, and grieving, a dying loved one, and almost daily walks in the nature around my home. Both have grown into the work I share with you here.
As for so many of us, lucky enough to be at home, my days took on a surreal blurry sameness in lockdown, and my only way of marking the time and breaking the monotony was a daily walk in nature. I’ve lived in the same place for 15 years, yet the intimacy I developed with this place deepened incredibly with that constant ritual – noticing the subtle and minute changes day to day, breathing in the trees and plants as a type of sustenance I had never needed quite so much before. My eyes and ears and lungs and soul became imbued with their presence and essence and they were metabolized into the work I am now making. Their colors and shapes flowing out of my hands, all of that beauty that had been infusing me for over a year.
I also helped to care for someone very close to my heart. The daily tasks of tending to a failing body and the bittersweet caring for a spirit. The sitting vigil as life faded, acutely following the breath, the sounds and colors shifting. The last moments, ugly and painful, yet profoundly beautiful. Then, the going on and sitting with the fullness of too many feelings and the empty space of where they were. And when I could, I’d walk….
And at the same time the world around me filled with death. I would tick off the numbers in my journal: 4450, 16,609, 75,069, 211,408…and on…and on…and on…. And I would walk, step… step… step…
And fires and floods, and reckonings, and unrest. And all the while I would walk, and all the while the trees and plants continued their cycle and things would die and things would then grow again.
So, I guess a fascination with death. Not in a morbid way, but as an acknowledgment that it is a part of all things, and life would not be without its counterpart in the dance. These cycles give me comfort, watching nature renew herself, knowing that this is just what is, and what must be, and though can be hard and gut wrenchingly painful, there is beauty- deep, soul touching beauty.
And as we enter spring, and come out of the latest surge, a new theme begins emerging. Suddenly big juicy flowers begin unfurling and blooming in my work. The first to arrive I name “Flourishing”. Perhaps the antidote to our year of languishing? An aspirational expression of, dare I say, Hope?
