At the root of my work is a desire to connect with place. The more I know a place, the more settled I feel. I desire to understand a region, both its natural beauty and the structures we’ve built within its landscape. My work oscillates between industrial and organic landscapes. At times it holds both nature and industry within one image, but more often, these contrasting themes exist parallel to each other. Both can have beauty and be terrible and hostile; both can be orderly and yet fragile. Having explored and lived throughout the United States, I’ve seen pristine alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada, have hiked across two hundred year old stone walls in New England, and have sat on Lake Superior’s clean shore and watched 700 foot ships enter the harbor.
In exploring a region intimately, I’ve become fascinated by human’s interactions with an area. Within city limits, industrial innovation is celebrated; bridges dynamically move, lighthouses communicate, and buildings stand tall. My work captures the ingenuity of engineers designing bridges and historic structures. In natural environments, my work celebrates the wilderness and changing seasons, wintery paths and low bright light, vibrant summer colors. At first glance, human interaction with these spaces appears minor, footpaths and insignificant detritus along a trail. But I’m reminded of our earth’s vulnerability when I hear about wildfires sweeping across forests and towns in California, and I shudder to think of the microplastics I’ve consumed from my own drinking water coming from Lake Superior. I love the landscapes in my work and am begging the viewer to love them as well. Through the labor intensive use of relief printing, I offer great care carving the landscapes. Through the use of bold lines, textures, and layered color, each print acknowledges my own human interaction with a landscape. My work is an impression built by the gouging out of linoleum, each layer adding a little less information, but more specific detail. In the time spent carving and hand printing a place, my heart is tied to it. In printing a place, it becomes a part of me and the earth for me to stand on. |
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