Cut grass Cut crickets and slugs and snails Cut small snake Grass smell Warm grass smell Clippings drying in white light Clippings lumped up on the edges where poppers and irises grow Cool and moist and green underneath Returning, Inevitable To gather and collect what is left Force into a structure Make it take form Wonder why Fragments settle and shift Down Composted where gravity has had time Leave the meadow Leave the house Leave home Go to the forest Empty woods Water runs hollow under ice Stony brook sounds and snowflakes layering on red leaves Leave the winter leave the spring Do it again Up granite Over mica To the lookout Log pile in the saddle between Burned out Or attempted Half burned log pile Old tractor tracks Wood chips Bush snaggles and wisps Shards and this section of woods that is now rocks and stumps and shreds The smell of pine in the heat Smell of spruce and balsam Pieces and fragments and love and grief and guilt and shame and joy and pain Upend it Hold it Live with it Remnant (for Daddy, Gondhi, Pampa, Poppy, Uncle Kevin, Uncle John, Aunt Nancy, Grandpa John, Grandma Dixie, Chalotte, Steven, Elfido, Earth)
Wash is a series of paintings centering on the erosion and physical aftermath of the Las Conchas fire that ravaged 634 acres of wilderness in northern New Mexico, summer 2011. This area was particularly at risk due to extreme drought conditions, invasive beetle species, and negligence on the part of the local power company. Through images from this erosion I explore the subtleties and complex, awe-creating nature of human impact on wilderness and global climate change while simultaneously working through concepts of acceptance and responsibility.
Images for this series come from an area along the Rio Grande Valley south of Los Lunas, in central New Mexico. Bosque management efforts had been made previously to remove undergrowth in the hopes of reducing fire hazards. Residual piles of detritus were lumped throughout the disturbed riparian habitat, left to erode over time. Themes central to this series involve right-to-land concepts, ownership, paternity and dominance over nature, and misguided stewardship beliefs. It also looks at ways humans justify potentially destructive management practices in natural areas and the resulting wildness, power, and inevitability of nature to reclaim and the resulting beauty of that struggle.
High and Dry focuses on unseen boundaries in land ownership and questions about our human connection to the natural environment. While the focus of this series is placed mainly on the invisible and intangible limitations of modern attitudes toward physical property and ownership the overall impression is one of freedom and expanse and connectedness.
Chimera is a multimedia performance piece that questions human attitudes toward animals, focusing on scientific research, trophy hunting, and snare/snap trapping. Chimera came out of research on a sheep-goat chimera that was created by scientists in a laboratory combining cells of a sheep and a goat at the fetal stage. It was then studied throughout its short life. The work involves an imagined human/animal chimera made up of animals that were killed either through trophy/sport hunting, or trapping. The performance itself is a movement based representation of the birth, life, and death of the chimera with special emphasis on the struggle.
