Artist Statement - how the land holds us | how we hold the land

As an artist I am drivent to share my deeply felt, and impossible to verbalize, sense of place. Painting is how I share this feeling. Exploring in a language of color, shape, and mark to represent the possibilities of a speculative reality—a queer temporality—where past/present/future exist simultaneously & in harmony. The layers of paint act as a rumination for threads of rhizomatic consciousness, compression & erosion, erasure & revelation, all of which resolve on the surface of the canvas opening pathways into and through the work. The active practice of art-making. Art as verb (thank you cannupa hanska luger for this idea/language). For me, painting is the verb made tangible. The documentation of the messy, interconnected, observable, and unobservable stuff that is forever imperfectly captured when I put brush to canvas.

I paint the landscapes where I have lived alongside landscapes of my ancestors. Places that resonate cellularly within my body. I feel an embodied connection to these places, to oceans and rivers, breathtaking vistas, densely packed and angled strata carved into hillsides, the way human detritus disrupts, and becomes disrupted by, the land.

I use abstraction as a tool to explore a multiplicity of ideas, to build and share this speculative reality and to offer entryways into this conversation. While my work is informed by personal landscapes, I am interested in how these worlds are considered by others.  How they are both familiar and dislocating?

Every painting starts with photographic references of place—mostly taken by me or gleaned from history. These images are juxtaposed together—a painting may contain elements of the east & west coasts for example—and compositions are created with little regard to natural color and scale. My process, once brush touches canvas, is intuitive and multi-layered. Each surface worked and re-worked five, or ten, or more times, searching for the places of possibility, of barely resolved tensions, of loosely gathered ideas, of fragmented sentences.

Also essential to my practice is to be in creative conversation with the written word. This body of work was developed alongside an interest in deepening my exploration of embodiment through painting alongside topics including: attempts to repair the manmade damage to our environment through technical innovation, how feminism and queerness disrupt the technosphere, indigenous practices of land stewardship and relationship, and how our relationships with one another and the world around us can be reframed through a lens of caretaking, solidarity, and mutual aid. Titles for painting often have come directly from phrases within these titles, or have been deeply inspired by, these writings. Here is an incomplete list of some of the writings that have informed this series of paintings in no particular order.Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams; The Overstory, Richard Powers; Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet; Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Elizabeth Kolbert; Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Legacy Russell; Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler; Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown; Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction;mBefore I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being, Amy Fung;mThe Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas; Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath; The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker; Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer.