Recent Artworks: Mapping Losses
Artist’s Statement
Exploring issues of identity, place, and loss of place through natural disaster, my recent work processes grief over a wildfire that destroyed the lodgepole pine forest surrounding my family’s rustic log cabin in Montana. Millions of bleak, charred snags remain in place of the forest environment that defined my identity, and that was my lifelong sanctuary and psychological refuge.
In solitude as a child, I explored the magical places between the roots of trees where surely the fairies lived. I walked on paths in the dark shade of the forest where mushrooms sprouted after a rain, and where moss covered the rocks in a secret freshwater spring. I climbed glacial boulders the size of buildings, waded in cold mountain creeks, merged with the roar of waterfalls, built a life of fantasy and later, contemplation, within the kind shelter of the forest. I carry the memories with me as one carries the comforting memory of one’s childhood house; a part of me.
Natural disaster rudely and suddenly destroys significant portions of one’s identity, and often one is left to grieve without the understanding support of others, unlike in the case of a death in the family. Yet the land endures and prevails with time, signified in my work by the lines from topographical maps of the area. These lines are carved into the substrata of a many-layered encaustics panel, revealing the potential for color and joy returning beneath the blackened burnt forest. Fire is necessary to open the pine cones and regenerate the new life; death clears space for the newly born. Already the new wildflowers bloom amid the tall grasses nurtured by charcoal.
