nature and landscape,
place and time
nature and cycles of change; land marked by dwelling and cultivation;
places both familiar and ephemeral
time orchestrates it all, the material erosion and successive new growth –
as an artist, it is these endless variations that draw my attention
and inspire me to create
Earth pigment
cloth and stitch
Pigment from earth and stone in a liquid binder of soy milk, painted or rubbed or dripped onto linen, allows me to make work in a kind of evocative abstraction that speaks to the ways I think and feel about landscape – particularly the working landscapes of today’s agriculture.
Nature and time
handwork
Nature is tactile, with sensual surfaces that speak to human touch, that can be felt with the eyes and the emotions. This group of work is mostly smaller scale, a size that’s pleasing to hold in the hand while working. [I hope the viewer can imagine this feeling.] Stitch as mark-making has a physicality that a drawn line lacks – think about laying bricks, one at a time, one over another, over others. Building.
Quilts
a beginning with fabric
Quilts offered a way into starting to think about making with fabric. The breadth and variety of materials, and methods for transferring to cloth were both exciting land daunting. Gradually I began to find a way through, found methods of working that appealed, in which I could find my own voice.
As a child, I was an artist and maker.
As an architect, I learned about process and iterations.
As a landscape architect, I learned to think about and look at landscape.
Returning to the practice of art, I am still thinking about and looking at landscape and spaces, especially those marked by our habitation.
Bend in the White River,
Spring Morning 2023
Tree, trees and my art
Many artists have a kind of totemic element or figure that appears regularly in their work. Mine is the tree. To organize this work for presentation – different media and times in my working life – I looked for trees, and found different kinds of imagery. Field Edge is an abstraction of a familiar midwestern landscape, the edges between planted fields, irregular lines of trees and other ‘natural’ growth. Wood Remembers Tree is a literal documentation, made on silk noil cloth placed between two logs stacked vertically, left for months to weather and begin disintegration. The artwork is an act of mending. Four Trees, Four Seasons, an early project, is a series of rubbings of bark patterns on cloth with crayon.