Art, Nature & Belonging
talking to earth… an artist’s voice
My heart, hands, and body are drawn to your storied beauty and your complexity. My mind reveres you. To you I belong. Your mind is embedded in multiple folds of mutuality… forms co-arising as the light hits your crescendoing and bespoke curves. You identify me in ways beyond – I am embedded in your aliveness. My dependency on you is total. You shock me with everything you do, know, and are. There is tactility in this belonging, and awe, that scares, thrills, and comforts me; begs me rise. I am beside myself at the loud loss of our naturally emerging beauty, of our diverse knowing, our intimate wild places. We exist within this delicate balance of coherence and vulnerability. It is not hostile. Notice these landscapes of living languages as they breathe us into being. They have names too. We are preciously intertwined, precariously interwoven… one body breathing.
'Egrets and landscape' - Richmond Bay, CA, 2021-2022
The following is a journey through my imagination, as it expands out into the beauty of the Bay as I walk. I invite you to go step by step with me, see how I transform this sensory walk into form. There are stages of discovery and process, inviting the viewer to travel ‘backwards’ from the form they might first see, entering into the idea of the form that it is yet to become, perhaps witnessing its birth.
'Movement flows' - Richmond Bay, CA, May 2023
Focusing in; photographic impressions…
As I walk, focusing on what I see, and smell and hear – I am listening for their sounds, rhythms, patterns and rituals, what is their focus? When I peer into the details of how things feel, and are, then I seek to capture that purposefulness of life in motion… first in a photograph. What you see below is the landscape through which I wander, sometimes for hours, noticing what is around me, sensing its movement and flow.
Blurring the lines…
In order to experience the journey backwards from manifested ‘form’ to the energetic impulses of that form, I play with exposure, and time. I seek to reassure my intimacy. We do not know something just by seeing it – there are many ways of knowing, and being known. I contemplate life becoming form – and why. Blurring the lines of what I see enables me to sink deeper into a shared vulnerability where I have to feel my way toward you. See through the representational, and you have the tenderness of life dancing with the liminal.
Photographic impressions become painted realizations…
These acrylics on watercolour are impressions from this walk where egrets and herons gather and feed. You will notice that the colours become more blue, brown, and grey – this is because I saw that the egret is not separate from its environment; the San Francisco Bay. That landscape; with its washed up wood and branches, the grey mud that the birds forage in, the murky waters, blue sky and grey clouds, are all part of the egret, and the egret is an expression of its own landscape; they are one and the same. As I walk in that, with that, as that… I become part of this landscape’s story. The paintings are an expression of relationship, motion and aliveness.
