"While unpacking hundreds of individually wrapped porcelain pieces I brought back from artist residencies at Muséum d’Historie Naturelle & École du Breuil d’Horticultural in Paris, I am flooded with memories of many summers I spent assisting Sophia, my grandmother, with her plant specimen collections and working with Thomas, my grandfather in his Victory Garden. Sophia had hundreds of specimen cuttings in her formal dining room, some being prepared for propagation, others hanging from strings and some seeds soaking in glasses fermenting. At the time I didn’t recognize the impression these moments intertwined with plants would have on me."

 

The nature of human identity has shifted politically to a separation of natural place. This societal state with the environment can be seen as a root cause for the ecological degradation we are currently experiencing globally. These broken links amplify miscomprehension in turn exposing the fragility, vulnerability and longing for connection. A conundrum exists: how can we relearn desires to coexist within our natural world while the symbiotic relationship we share with other lifeforms critically informs the connections and disconnections on the horizon. 

 

This landscape installation is referencing historical spacial subjectivity intersecting visual poetic content while questioning relational constituent parts found in nature. I listen to the language of plants through observation, the writings of Native American Indians in combination with Western Science and studying colonized domestication in naturalist’s specimen collections. My current pieces are from fieldwork at two artist residencies I attended in Paris. One at Muséum d’Historie Naturelle photographing and drawing enlarged abstracted details of the skeletal specimen collection.  Another at École du Breuil d’Horticultural utilizing plant cutting to form petrified porcelain botanical specimens. The drawings is an allusion to bone specimens suggesting wood while the porcelain fossil like flora suggests skeletal bone structures.

 

My current work stems from the interconnectedness of all life by visually deconstructing natural forms that are open to more than one interpretation by the viewer. I search the uncertainties of the unknown and find the similarities signifying the push-pull between introspective meditation and the interpreted layered realities of the outside world.