Ecology Without Nature
2014-2015
My work explores the experience of my physical body searching for a sense of integration with the landscape. I bring my experiences from nature into the studio through memories and collected objects. I then create an image through veils of paint that evokes the feelings the landscape imparted on me.
The human figure serves as a starting point and inspiration for my landscapes to grow over and envelop. Though the figure becomes obscured in the process, the body is present within the work through my active application of materials to the canvas.
I use cake decorating tools as a way of drawing and sculpting into my paintings. I add gravel, rocks, sand, dirt, wax, and fibers into my paint in order to think of a two dimensional material as a sculptural medium. I press herbs and found organic matter into the surfaces of my paintings, working to obscure what areas are painted and which are collaged.
The cyclical nature of my work mirrors seasonal changes in the landscape through specificity of color and subject-matter. I use symbols, narratives, and archetypes from nature, mythology and religious texts as the subjects of my paintings. I explore themes of life, death, passing on, and rebirth. Alive and decomposing flowers, windows, the absence of the human figure, and expansive empty fields are reoccurring subject matter that I see as metaphors for these ideas. There is an additive and subtractive property to my work that allows me to reflect the natural processes of accumulation, decomposition, and regeneration within nature.
