We have some technologies for aiding our quest toward consciousness, toward
life-death-life cycle affirmation. These are the technologies of symbol making,
experiencing community as spirit, infusing wildness with cultivation, blending
the natural and the cultural with conscience. I believe that visual traditions
and themes create a kind of language that exerts a powerful effect on social
consciousness. I am interested in the Western landscape tradition, especially
in its ability to distance the viewer from the outdoors and other people.
Because I am fascinated by the politics of art making, I think of my work
as primarily directed toward public issues and contexts. By integrating texts
and imagery, I incorporate the intimate and the reflective, to ponder the ways
images or ideas affect us and support responsible actions. To better express
the complexity of ideas than is possible in individual paintings, I prefer to
work in the visual art genre of installations when exploring themes with ecological
content. In the search for a different visual language for landscape, I have
been inspired by many traditions including Roman and Byzantine mosaics, Japanese
decorative art, indigenous Australian paintings and shrine technologies of many
cultures. In works such as Views and Reviews, I like to think of some contemporary
tourist destinations as shrines, offering visitors a share in their meaning:
Mt. Rainier, the US Capitol, Graceland, the Oregon Trail, the Grand Canyon.
I think of my work over the past ten years as expressing a theme--Land Use:
An Alchemical Treatise. I use the term biocenology because it is the study of
communities and member interactions in nature. Some of the works explore the
connections between our belief systems about society and how we treat the planet,
each other. Others examine the ways traditional cultural practices--landscape
painting and the concept of Arcadia--have contributed to contemporary land use
practices.
Currently I am working on acrylic and mixed media paintings, part of two shrine
series, one about Frederick Douglass, the 19th century US orator, and the others
about land use. In these works I am interested in exploring the intersections
of human activity, ecosystems and geologic presence. In my painting and shrines,
I am trying to develop a visual and symbolic language of seeds, sprouting forms,
land shapes, fish and female figures to explore the contradiction of diversity
and overlapping multiplicity within a culture whose dominant ideology expresses
conflict in individualism and capitalism. Each painting is framed or scrolled
as though it were a laboratory specimen box, reflecting the culture's attempt
to contain such truth and control it. In installations, some large works essentially
become wallpaper and are not at all necessarily contained.