Can art carry the burden of remembering what used to be while confronting what the future may hold? My profound connection to nature and our impact on the environment has been an overriding theme in my work throughout my years as an artist.  For my series, The Dry Stone No Sound of Water, of which ‘The Dry Rock’ is a part, I use my farm and the land it encapsulates as a muse along with inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.   From a fixed point on a map, I am a traveler through the Anthropocene.

I construct theaters, tearing, twisting, and folding. I create imaginary landscapes and still life in the spirit of 17th century vanitas paintings using photographs I have taken over the years. I explore issues of life and death, indulgent consumption, and our fundamental alienation from the natural world.  The act of crushing a well-made photograph is a personal and performative existential act and the resulting final arrangement and print evokes images of nature incrementally subjugated by human exploitation.  The lens transforms, and the results can be simultaneously beautiful, confrontational, and disturbing.

This series allows me to be an advocate and guardian for the land, using art not only as a method of communication and an expression of grief, but a profound acknowledgement of our astonishing natural world, and the desire to find splendor in what remains.