2012 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

This work of the last five years is the result of several life changes. After living 20 years in a suburban neighborhood, I moved to a rural and forested area as a result of a separation. A flood ravaged my home. Belongings and work were washed away. I literally had to begin again from scratch. In doing so, I returned to a personal drawing practice after seven years of interdisciplinary action-based collaborations in the urban environment.

Through graduate school my work was concerned with relationships of power within personal and social systems of political economy. How marginalization occurs for any individual or group, and how we register complicity with mechanisms of control.

Presently these concerns are driven more intimately through my focus on family systems and plant bodies (including fungus). This “root” work is engaged with language, enmeshment, display and decay. Plentiful and free, blue jay nests, inverted root balls and many species of worms have been regularly collected for the compelling entanglement of their lines which reference and reflect my own personal struggles. Projecting emotional states on patterns of structure became my “still life” study. Simultaneously I began to make gouache sketches of the mushrooms where I walk daily. I began collecting them in earnest, making simple spore prints, drying them for display purposes in plasticina blocks for installation.

The graphic lines, storied lineages, and nerve endings work together conceptually for a figurative imagery at once indexical and iconic, fungal and ‘contextured’. They are montaged in visual studies and braided into open narratives. A chthonian research.