Through a creative practice that permeates all aspects of my life, I cultivate relationships with ecosystems to glean and participate in their wisdom. The insights I gain on the (literal) ground are then transferred into relationships with humans and societal systems, extending my visual practice into one of communication and leadership. But to begin, my spirited “process of acquaintance” involves multi-sensory, relational research and collaboration with the animate world as synthesized through visual means.
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 synesthetic, 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 these [constructs of]place, time, and person, the boundaries 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.
And live them into the world I do. Teaching, collaborating, consulting, speaking, mentoring, parenting, friending, partnering; as a result of absorbing the rhythms of the world into my being, my practice propels itself into all human dimensions. There is no realm in which insights gathered on the ground do not offer expert guidance; my gift and responsibility is to elegantly and dexterously receive, transport, translate, and transmit.
