Studio Statement

A Long Arc

My work has moved through many forms over the past twenty years: altered natural imagery, imagined space, dense graphite cities, ecological environments, figures, vanitas still lifes, and landscape. These bodies of work can appear separate when viewed one at a time, but they belong to one continuous studio practice. Across them, I have returned to the relationship between human construction and forces that exceed human control. I am interested in the systems we build, the images and symbols we use to understand them, and the way those structures are changed by time, nature, scale, technology, mortality, and cultural pressure. I did not begin with that language. The work developed first. The language came later, after enough time had passed for me to see that the changes in subject and method were not breaks in the practice. They were stages in a longer inquiry. Each series brought a different part of that inquiry forward, while carrying something from the previous work into the next. The current Post-Globalist Landscapes do not replace those earlier bodies. They clarify what had been moving through them. The cosmic scale of the early work, the constructed systems of the graphite drawings, the ecological pressure of the animal paintings, the cultural and technological structures of the figurative work, and the material impermanence of the vanitas paintings now meet in the landscape. What was once carried by imagined worlds and symbolic objects is now held directly in the relationship between land, infrastructure, growth, weather, and time.