Mapping

excerpts from statements about techniques I use and why:

[re: Views and Reviews, 1999]
think of my work over the past sixteen years as expressing a theme–Land Use: An Alchemical Treatise. Some of the works explore the connections between our belief systems about society and how we treat the planet, each other. Others examine the ways traditional cultural approaches–landscape painting and the concept of Arcadia–have contributed to contemporary land use practices. In works such as Views and Reviews, I like to explore the conflicts which arise from our expectations about land use, expectations shaped by idealized art and design images and our vernacular urban setting. Using the quotation essay, I want to think about different forms of resistance and resilience as strategies, sometimes alternating, to foster our lives and activities.
I have also created shrines for community based environmental activities: Flowing Salmon Shrine and Speculations. Artists in many cultures developed shrines to incorporate both artistic and ethical values, often to express the sacred quality of a particular site, such as a spring, a tree or one with historical significance. Shrines may be local or draw visitors from far and near. I like to think of some contemporary tourist destinations as shrines, offering visitors a share in their meaning: Mt. Rainier, the US Capitol, Graceland, the Oregon Trail, the Grand Canyon, and refer to this quality in Views and Reviews.

[from the Slave Trade was Free Trade 2001]
Currently I am working on acrylic and mixed media paintings, part of two shrine series, one about Frederick Douglass, the 19th century US orator, and the others about land use. In these works I am interested in exploring the intersections of human activity, ecosystems and geologic presence. In my painting and shrines, I am trying to develop a visual and symbolic language of seeds, sprouting forms, land shapes, fish and female figures to explore the contradiction of diversity and overlapping multiplicity within a culture whose dominant ideology expresses conflict in individualism and capitalism. Each painting is framed or scrolled as though it were a laboratory specimen box, reflecting the culture’s attempt to contain such truth and control it. In installations, some large works essentially become wallpaper and are not at all necessarily contained.