THE RISE AND FALL OF STONE: WORKS ON BECOMING

My work revolves around ancestral history, storytelling, and ecological concern in an exploration of memory and landscape. The paintings reference specific landscapes, but I work to depict each place somewhere between reality and memory. In the landscapes, white space meets fields of muted color through shattered lines of graphite, suggesting a continuous cycle of transformation.

The largest work in the show, “Oj ty rzeko,” is titled after a Polish folk song, which alludes to a lack of reciprocity in our relationship with the forces of nature. The viewer looks up-river from their place on a pile of boulders to a burn zone standing before a distant mountain. I hope to create an oscillation in each landscape, both visual and narrative, reminiscent of an attempt to recall a dream upon waking.

With my grid of “Rock Portals” I hope to condense this process. When I hold a rock I have collected from a specific place, I step easily into the memory of that landscape. These portraits of rocks reflect that process with their place of origin defined in the titles. The greyscale rocks float in a field of color, colors pulled from their physical appearances, which evoke the feeling of the landscapes they have been removed from. 

My background in permaculture and a lineage of Eastern European foresters first drove me to explore humanity’s relationship with the natural world through my art practice. More recently, I have expanded on these ideas, reacting to anthropocentrism and a sense of uprootedness, both personal and intergenerational, by studying Earth-based traditions. As I reflect upon stories from the spirits of the land, my own memory, and those of my ancestors, I ask questions about how we relate to place through the lenses of wildness, stewardship, civilization, and change.