deconstructing nature 

It is easy to have a nostalgic attitude toward nature; something we left behind and desire to return to, something we visit, photograph, and leave.  I have come to view nature as environment, including all the spaces and systems I inhabit and because I am part of these systems, I too, am nature. It has been a gentle but powerful shift from reverence for what is outside and separate, to an acknowledgement of my role within the system. I no longer look at nature as exotic; rather I see it as everyday. It is the grass pushing through my sidewalk, it is the sidewalk and it is the person who put the sidewalk there. It is the goods I buy, the politics I set into motion, as well as the sun rising over the Cascades and setting in the Olympics. This changing view of nature has fueled my interest in a marriage of industrial or man-made materials with forms derived from plants, animals, geology and the elements. It has also driven my interest in making art that places the viewer as subject, establishing an environment that revels in the ambiguities and complexities of meaning and experience.                       

reconstructing culture

Reconstructions builds on the shape and surfaces inherent in the fabric of used truck inner tubes. The deconstructed material carries the temperament of its previous shape and the markings of its original use. When the donut shape is splayed, its dips and protrusions are revealed suggesting new forms. Surprisingly these forms tend toward the organic. They are flaccid and relaxed. They want to relate to each other and to the forms around them. This is a transformative process, but history is not obliterated.  Everything is in the process of becoming something else, while retaining the marks and codes of what it was before.