My work is shaped by my relationship to wild spaces where I have lived in Alaska and in Montana, my birthplace and home. I create photographs, sculpture and masks expressing uncommon views of natural forms.
In my photography work I consider myself a visual artist who collaborates with nature utilizing photography as a tool. In the editing process I make design choices to feature chosen elements. I experiment with a range of image abstraction and poetic interpretation which can make my photographs look more like paintings.
My work is informed by a lifetime of engagement with the natural world and over forty years of experience in the arts. I am a primarily self-taught visual artist with long roots in design and using the arts as a practice of engagement, connection, and interaction.
My artistic practice is often an expression of what I notice when I walk in the woods near my home and in wild places. I experience these moments as layers of interactions with the temperature, light, air, water, plants, insects, animals and inorganic elements in the landscape. I bring these relationships to my work and see how we can collaborate to create something new.
Whether it is photography, sculpture, mask making or writing, I like finding how things fit together. It is a discovery, an exchange between the direction already present in the materials or images, my visceral experience of a place and my curiosity. I seek to capture the interdependent relationships I see. More and more as an artist I am seeking ways to express how plastics are harming the life forms of our planet.
Writer, farmer and activist, Wendell Berry, describes the care of the earth as our most ancient and worthiest responsibility. I dedicate my art making and art actions in the service of that responsibility and my hopes for the health of the earth, our home.