Through a creative practice that permeates all aspects of my life, I cultivate relationships with ecosystems to glean and participate in their wisdom. These insights, gained quite literally on the ground, inevitably extend to humans and societal systems; thus, my practice also continues within these realms. However, my spirited “process of acquaintance” begins in collaboration with the animate world.
The conversation starts with research and on-site fieldwork at a chosen, usually outdoor, location. A convergence of perspectives from natural science, history, philosophy, cognitive science, and spiritual traditions inform my own in-situ phenomenology as a synaesthetic, human sensor. With drawing, collage, painting, installation, photography, and digital media, I create work on site, continue in the studio, and, if the situation allows, revisit the site. As I experience different vantage points, time scales, seasons, and materials, conversations expand, understanding deepens, and I gladly surrender to the familiar inevitability: I am participating in an ever-expanding, multi-dimensional, transitory whole.
The collection of work from a given site accumulates to compose a team of meaning-seekers, eager to translate insights that can only be revealed through a continuity of intimate, reciprocal, ongoing participation. In such an idiosyncratic convergence of this place, this person, and this [construct of] time, the boundaries between it and myself grow porous. Each time this happens, my process of acquainting morphs into a reciprocity of consciousness: the insights my collaborator has gifted me arise and are activated within myself. The task then becomes to live them into the world.
