LAND BACK
A wetland: with thrashers, crows, towhees, raptors and bees, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, fence lizards.
Atascadero, Spanish for stuck in the swamp, in Chumash, 'tsɨskikiye,' where waters gather.’
The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the
night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding.
In the context of understanding North America as Turtle Island, my life has been dedicated to landscape. Conceptually, paintings warp out of the twist of encounters, directly within the so called West, from my birthplace in the shadow of Mount Baldy in the San Gabriels of LA county, to the Nebraska prairies where I grew up, to the Kansas and Missouri savannah where I raised my children and taught, to now, in 'tsɨskikiye,' colonially known as central coast California. In these works is a renewed charge to make more than an image, rather a distillate of story, littered with bits. As if you might encounter, in a clearing, some mess in the woods where someone, mammal, will have just given birth?
In terms of identity, my subjectivity is inflected by settler experience; my people come from two 'indigenous' European communities, the Sorbs and the Frisians, as well as from Lusatian Saxons. From Colonsay, the name McPhee was acquired by way of an early marriage, before art school, so I kept the ring of it in two silent H's.
Rounded by a swamp of silent letters, a seasonal creek activated by El Niño. I"m a groundling in a chaparral garden. My body conducts tectonic shifts across the wrack of sites. These crowd my mind like hungry sediments: they become an archive of landscape. Traumatic trace, aura of futurity, inoperable, exceeding image. Physicality, presence, I was there, you are here.