​​

 

 

​

 Landscape | Land Back

​

[field notes]

​

​

 

Ethically my desire and will is bound up in the experience of growing up in the late twentieth century 'American West.' 

​

​As a child of settler background, daughter of an 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. Relay and reconnaissance compressed time and space. Out on the Plains I lived a scenario with so much capacity, you couldn't  apprehend its scale and detail and luxurious excess.  Road cuts, roadside geology, sand storms, petals. ​Now I live in another rural place, Chumash territory, alongside a swamp. Chaparral plants grab onto ledges of schist. The swamp, deceptive, may have wet feet and dry socks. Swamp, a metaphor for epistemologies of the relational....lives in relation to studio, each for the other. I want to ask: what is land back in the context of this exchange? Land Back is not a metaphor. My own people, some of them, were indigenous in Europe, then became immigrant agents of the colony, ironically.  Braiding descent, dissent, dissonance, listening for spatial texture, a textuality even. Aesthetics and politics of living as an uninvited guest on this land: cycles of gestures store, embellish, discharge, recharge, repeat. Zones of inhuman alienation, negative capability, materialize. Painting intimates forms of life, in tiny mark, in notation, in temporal expanse.

​

​

​

​

​

​
 

​​

​​​