Lately, I’ve been thinking about how my art practice has an ecosystem-based logic to it. I enter into and interact with various environments/biomes, and then I internalize that experience and spit it out as something else: an attempt to make my perceived experience visible... a record of consciousness moving through different terrains.
First, the ocean: power, intuition, dream states, hypnagogic flow, subconscious. Crushing depth, intricacy, leftover bodies and life emerging out of nowhere. To just be near the ocean is such an ephemeral experience since I live so far from the coast. My short pilgrimages are never satiating enough - only what my spouse and I can afford within a limited spectrum of time and money during a given summer... a 13 hour drive, a rental car, hundreds in lodging and food, traffic, a beach pass. There are so many hurdles to clear just for a brief sense of all-encompassing oneness.
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| Iceberg. Digital drawing. |
Next, the woods: moisture, texture, rainbow spectrums, wheels of color. Invisible forest energies. Circles and layers and integration. Vines and snakes and fungi and lichens. Mycelium. Slow decay. Death and regeneration everywhere within sight. I have the good fortune of having access to several wooded areas close to where I live where I can hike. This allows me intimacy and repetition with specific natural areas in which I can attune to subtleties in the environment.
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| Night Flight. Watercolor, Ink, and Gouache. |
Also: the prairie. Sky, expansiveness, a slow circle back to the ocean. Grasses that undulate in the wind like waves. An vague sense of the primordial and the extraterrestrial. Everything on the prairie feels alive, even the dead things. There's a sense of the interconnectedness of everything and a peace that makes the concerns of our human world seem completely silly.
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| Long Necks. Watercolor, Vellum, Cyanotype, and Embroidery. |
Finally, there's the embodied experience of living within a body, particularly a female body. The fluids we hold and the way these fluids pull with the tides. Humans are such liquid creatures in pregnancy, in menstruation, in the makeup of our bodies. I think a lot about the lived reality of how we are trapped inside fleshy, vulnerable, aging physical containers - a life we didn't ask for but nevertheless get to experience... until we don't anymore.
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| Villageless. Oil on Panel. |
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| Moon/Time. Alcohol Ink on Yupo paper. |
The earth is expansive and so is our capacity for creative channeling and flow. These biomes and ecosystems all contain a different kind of energy and to honor them demands a different kind of attention and response.
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