Nature is a reprieve and a reminder. Comforted by beauty and confronted with decay, the more you look outward into the world the more you see yourself. Even the most mundane of interactions with the environment can hold an expansiveness inside them. It is these everyday connections with the ephemeral that inform my work. Imagery repeated and fragmented in oil paintings, collages, installations, land art, and artist books speak to how our impressions of nature live in memories. Paintings viewed up close reveal further textures and small, swirling abstractions, while site-specific pieces are reinterpreted into artist books that reference these themes of time narratively. This constant re-translation of place in memory mirrors nature’s own continuous morphing.
These circular methods of unraveling and reconstructing become a personal, abstract way of record keeping as I learn the distinctiveness of the Midwestern landscape and mark its seasonal changes. By depicting through direct visual experience my own connection to these graceful and unsettling cycles, I invite the viewers to reflect on their own relationship with the environment and with themselves, as beings in nature. In prompting further identifications with the landscape through details that emphasize and celebrate its seemingly disparate shapes and textures, I offer an alternative to relying on nature as simply a vessel for our ideals and fears, and instead allow for intimate connection and recognition in the present moment.
