Plants
Plants and humans
Plants. The foundation of life on our planet and the source of my earliest memory of wonder and delight. Who are they? How do they live? What are they thinking? And why are they so beautiful? Ridiculous questions, yes. Or not.
And humans. Full of grace, poetry and heroics. And weirdly also unbelievably shortsighted, stupid and destructive. We have probably always been that way, even millennia ago, when we were fumbling around in the dirt to find pigments and make vessels.
Mysteriously, we are connected. We are clearly not the same, but we share DNA.
The paintings are partial portraits of plants taken while living, showing leaves or fruits or flowers as they join to the plant, turning, sometimes toward the sun. The physicality of the paint on silks allows me to build transient memories of the plants I've seen, moving and living.
The clay objects are built partly with plants I've collected while walking in my neighborhood in Seattle; and include structural shapes, such as vessels and rectangular stands, that reveal my human presence. Later, the plants burn off in the kiln, leaving an enclosed bit of plant ash, tiny sepulchers.
I feel that this work connects me to prehistorical peoples who also made art with pigments and clay, and especially to other, sometimes overlooked species.