Traces
For a while now, I’ve been working with ideas about mapping and cartography, and what this tells us about our relationships with the landscape as well as the plants, animals, and geological elements within. There are so many different ways our 3-dimensional (or 4-dimensional) world gets translated into two dimensions. In exploring historic maps, garden plans, land surveys, and GIS, I’ve become interested in the various ways we document our surroundings, from drone imagery to ground-truthing, to measuring erosion or tree growth patterns. As an avid gardener and forager, I also think a lot about the role that walking and looking plays in how we learn a landscape.
These observational practices are central to my artistic process, and as I finished up work related to Taiwan and its urban environment, I began to focus on the landscape around my home in rural Maine. In addition to my ongoing bug surveillance videos, I’ve taken images of frozen puddles in leaf litter and aerial shots of structures on this property as well as animal tracks in the snow. I’ve grown and foraged plants to create botanically-dyed cloth and silk threads with a palette derived from this land. With the intimacy of handstitching, the resulting embroidered artworks are quiet monuments to the elements of my world as I have gotten to know it.
Garden Structures
Silky Rocks and Lumber Piles
2023
plant-dyed cotton and eri silk
(marigold, madder, rudbeckia, sumac, indigo, purple-leaf cherry)
8 x 11 ½ inches
Rural living offers many things, including the opportunity to build your own unsightly pile of lumber scraps. This particular stack sits outside my studio, around the rocks on the way up the hill to the greenhouse that created it. Many different foraged and grown plants made the colors for this piece, and the lustre of silk makes for jewel-like embroidered rocks.
Flash Freeze
2023
plant-dyed cotton and eri silk
(sumac, rudbeckia, indigo)
20 x 15 inches
The pattern in this work is drawn from one of the frozen puddles that comes and goes with the mountain run-off during the spring thaw. The colors were created with indigo, sumac, and brown-eyed susans from the surrounding land.
Footprints
Once the snow sets in, it becomes clear how many animals live alongside us. The deer come up to the house every night to eat the rhododendron, the mice scurry around the front door, and ravens scavenge the compost daily. Fresh snow is very good at revealing the movements of life.
Bug Surveillance
Since 2014, I have been shooting videos of traveling insects on my phone as I've lived in various places around the world. From the beginning, I set a rule that the bugs would enter and exit the frames, rather than being followed, and the effect is something similar to watch you might see on a surveillance camera. The videos are housed wooden boxes of various dimensions, each asking viewers to peer into the container, as you might crane your neck to see something through a window or down a hole.
