wild not wild
I walk every day in my neighborhood in the very far end of northeast Seattle. Not very long ago there was a forest here, and now it’s not wild, but it’s still pretty green. There are a number of tall trees and green garden spaces, though those are dwindling as single family lots turnover to multiple single family spaces. I like that there are few sidewalks, and I that can walk both on dirt paths on rights of ways between lots, as well as asphalt street centers. I have made several new friends on these walks, just chatting with neighbors about our lives. I walk regularly with old friends too. But mostly I pay attention to all that green, all those plants. I cannot remember a time in that I did not look at plants, and I have always wondered what it would be like to be a plant. I wonder about our sense of ourselves as humans, and how that sense sometimes keeps us distant, somewhat incapable of seeing plants as other living things. Neighborhood walks have inspired my “wild not wild” series of paintings and sculptures.
The paintings are made on silk(s) with various selections of casein, inks, graphite and acrylics. Sometimes I paint images of what I see as striking plant/ human interactions, like odd or difficult prunings. But I’ve always also been looking for something more mysterious. Who are they? Who are we? Who are we together?
The sculptures are made with porcelain and/or stoneware, and bits of plant material I collect while walking. The dried leaves, petals and seed pods each hold a record of how the plant lived; and each leaf, petal or seed pod has a totally unique form. I could not replicate that if I even tried. I try to preserve those forms as I cover the plant parts in many successive layers of slip. Later, after the plants burn in the kiln, the enclosed and compressed ashy cremains of plant are left in tiny ceramic tombs, in shapes that the plant made during it’s lifetime. My sculptures are reliquaries for once living plants. I use those little tombs to create complex sculptural compositions
I am not a religious person, but what I feel is worship.