Living matter is a specific kind of rock ... an ancient and, at the same time, an eternally young rock.

Vladimir Vernadsky

My work is about environmental melancholia, an urgent and persistent reconciliation between humanity, industrialization, and nature. We are part of nature; waking viewers to this intrinsic connection is the core of my artistic practice. I work with elements that evoke the geological timescale—fossils, minerals, crystals, water, trees, plant fragments, abandoned architectural debris, industrial waste—transmuting these materials’ imperfect histories from demise to resurrection.

I use various historical art techniques—plaster, gesso pastiglia, clay-firing, medieval water gilding, egg and glue tempera, Renaissance buon fresco, and Bronze Age mold-making and casting. These represent a poignant metaphor for how we understand our relationship with the world and these substances’ alchemical past. I’m a geologist and botanist at heart, and these passions find expression in my work, where personal experience transforms into the universal, to experience ourselves inside a sense of deep complexifying time.

DE RERUM NATURA: on the nature of things


My ongoing body of work takes its overarching title from De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), the book by Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BCE). "Nothing can ever be created out of nothing, even by divine power. [...] Visible objects therefore do not perish utterly, since nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another’s death." A waterfall, a rainbow, a fallen tree, a stone, a crystal, clay—whether virtual or physical—these materials’ provenance is essential to convey to viewers that perfect crystallized moment of stillness; and the profound depth of particularity presented by the elusive power of being totally present in nature.

Journeying to distant locales has informed my work from the beginning. In nature I experience a concord essential and integral to my artistic practice. The resultant work becomes a visual record of my experience of landscape and a conduit for connection between nature and humanity. Like sedimentary rocks, my work is created with layer on layer of memory and emotion. And like metamorphic rock, each work is morphed or altered by new connections between each stratum. Unexpected associations and epiphanies emerge, creating the whole.

*"nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus umquam. [...] haud igitur penitus pereunt quaecumque videntur, quando alit ex alio reficit natura nec ullam rem gigni patitur nisi morte adiuta aliena." (Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, I, 150, 262-264.)


Cicninnati, OH, 2015

 

SLEEPING TREE | 2005 | henna, milk, tree resin, graphite, masking tape on paper | 48 x 183 cm | private collection

 

ABOUT THE GLOBAL TREE PROJECT


The Global Tree Project began when I encountered a large uprooted oak in a forest. It lay as if sleeping on a gently sloping grass-covered hill. When I returned a few days later, the tree had disappeared. In place of its roots remained a scar, a mound of raw earth. I envisioned a new tree growing on this mound.

Like Inanna-Ishtar, goddess of Sumerian myth, I wanted to pluck this uprooted tree and bring it to my sacred garden. I wanted the tree to lie and sleep, envisioning a new world like the dream of the world that emerges from the Indian god Vishnu’s navel in the form of a lotus flower.

As historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, if the plant and we come from the same uterus, we are twins. We didn’t die from the separation, as do some conjoined twins, but, somehow we need to be together. In my Global Tree Project, I try to heal our wound from this separation, and reopen our connection with nature to be whole, and to have a new vision through it.

Washington, DC, 2009


Das Global Tree Project begann damit, dass ich im Wald auf eine grosse entwurzelte Eiche stiess. Sie lag da, als schliefe sie auf einem sanft ansteigenden grasbedeckten Hügel. Als ich ein paar Tage später wieder dorthin kam, war der Baum verschwunden. Anstelle seiner Wurzeln war eine Wunde geblieben, ein Haufen blosser Erde. Ich malte mir aus, ein neuer Baum wüchse aus diesem Erdhügel empor.

Wie Inanna-Ishtar, die Göttin sumerischer Mythen, wollte ich den entwurzelten Baum auflesen und ihn in meinen geweihten Garten bringen. Ich wollte, dass der Baum dort läge und schliefe, und stellte mir dabei eine neue Welt vor – so wie jener Traum von der Welt, der dem Nabel des indischen Gottes Vishnu in Form einer Lotusblüte entspringt.

Wie schon der Religionshistoriker Mircea Eliade schrieb: Wenn die Pflanze und wir demselben Uterus entstammen, sind wir Zwillinge. Wir sind durch die Trennung nicht gestorben, wie es bei siamesischen Zwillingen passieren kann, aber irgendwie gehören wir zusammen. In meinem Global Tree Project versuche ich, die Wunde, die diese Trennung hinterlassen hat, zu heilen und unsereVerbindung mit der Natur zu erneuern, damit wir unsere Ganzheit zurückerlangen und ein neues Sehen lernen.

Übersetzung: Elvira Lackmann, Berlin