If you ask me 'What do you do?'
I'll usually just say 'A bunch of stuff.'
Art is embedded in my life so intrinsically that sometimes I can’t tell where I end and it begins. Being a synesthete as a child was completely average for me, and then I realized later that not every one saw colours in their mind’s eyes: the number 3 wasn’t blue for everyone. A chorus of colour would stream in with shifting sounds. Numbers and letters with designated colours transposing with simultaneously luminously coloured backgrounds would flicker, just in the back of my mind. These observations increasingly floated up to my awareness as I got older
These entwined relationships initiated a curiosity in me to explore the essence of the relationships between one thing and another, to observe the liminal spaces between each and every thing, idea, and moment, and to witness the weaving of a Universe in many states, all through colour and art. I see art as being the access point to the heart of every connection. I see it as being the pulse that moves energy from one space to another. I use art as a process to explore and relate to the spaces around me because we are a complex manifold of interconnections. I am also interested in various relationships within our environments and their potential to exemplify harmonious interactions. I believe that to explore and express complicated interrelations in nature through my art will elucidate gentler and more sustainable, environmentally aware approaches to being humans, wholly interwoven in our planetary ecosystems.
I have been inclined in the past several years to center my art more deeply in the theme of ecological awareness. I see biodiversity as an interdependent complexity that we are part of, not separate from. Contrary to the common anthropocentric perspective, I see an inextricable connection between each and every thing, with a multitude of shifting centers, including those center points that exist in the locus of the connections themselves. Considering the ways in which humans have disrupted and redirected our planet's natural processes, I am inclined to illustrate ways that we can shift our perspective to decenter human hierarchy and begin to co-exist in harmony with the planetary ecosystem again. To this end, my recent work includes the use of foraged materials, harvested sustainably from the forest with a heightened awareness of our quantum impressions. Sustainability means that some berries can be used for ink and others must be left to the chipmunks, the birds, decomposition, or for any other of the myriad of functions they support. My approach as an artist is patient, careful, and methodical. I learn what berries to leave by spending time in that space and observing how each element of an ecosystem operates with the others. The impression that I leave upon a space through my art must enrich and nourish that space.