Artist Statement
My work in drawing and painting media explores ideas of nature and the sublime through both representational and abstract means. In 2004 I began making paintings of abstract crystallized structures on panels, paper, and three-dimensional forms. My recent work reinserts the formal process of abstract, crystallized forms into the space of icy landscapes, attempting to bring disparate graphic languages into unsteady equilibriums.
The works in Glacial Speed and Extremities represent icebergs and glaciers both for their metaphoric power and their significance as barometers of global warming.
Extremities, begun in 2007, incorporates naturalistic detail with an invented vocabulary of abstract, crystallized forms and pooling watercolors to build images of melting icebergs. The icebergs are psychological metaphors expanded by the catastrophe of global warming into emblems of collapse. Their depths are alternatively hidden and revealed.
Glacial Speed imaginatively depicts the changing topography of a shrinking glacier. The project asks how it would look for a glacier to melt, if you could watch the changes year to year, decade to decade from above: wind-swept snow, avalanches, cracking ice, pools and torrents, draught and swamp. In Glacial Speed, 80 screen prints of a mapped glacier are individually painted with watercolor washes and abstracted forms to represent phases of change. At once constructing and collapsing time, a digital video with sound connects the stills in succession.