RECENT LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS
Collage and abstraction fuse in field-based works on canvas, in conversation with existential notions of place, temporality, iteration, and the fragment.
I live and work in and alongside a swamp with raptors and bees, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, tarantulas. Chaparral plants grab onto ledges of schist. The swamp, deceptive, may have wet feet and dry socks... The studio above it on rock, holds on. A lot of places are inaccessible but not to the imagination. Gaviota coast in Santa Barbara County, geology of the Sierra foothills in Calaveras County, California; the Mojave near Yuma, Arizona; Smoke Creek Desert in northwest Nevada; Bighorn, Wyoming, the Columbia Plateau in Washington; and elsewhere. As a child of settler background, daughter of a 'frontier' immigration historian and an editor, my experience of childhood was marked by exile from California, where I was born, to the prairie and plains of Nebraska. Isolation and the feeling of a million years stacked in the sky led me into drawing and fantasy. Landscape as a palimpsest of data-- this was clear in those days. The relay and reconnaissance compressing time and space into painting, the fugue-like propellants of visual and physical memory, the sense of walking into a scenario with so much capacity you can't apprehend its scale and detail and luxurious excess. Cycles of gestures store, embellish, discharge, recharge, repeat. Distillations of many travels, the years of pilgrimage, move through me. Zones of inhuman alienation, negative capability, materialize. Scale differentials from tiny mark to expanses of unmarked ground. North America or Turtle Island, either way you, I, we are in her deep. Road cuts, roadside geology, sand storms, petals.