“This Place Has Seen” - Statement

A mixed media paper landscape sculpted in topographic layers over the course of years by my family's feet on a winter walk, spring rains, Sunshine Valley soil, morning tea drips, cyanotype chemistry brush strokes, summer sun rays, metal shadows, patterned ground and glue. My work always invites curiosity, care and connection to self, family, community and ecology of place - this piece particularly references what is now called Sunshine Valley, in Northern New Mexico, our home. Rich blue cyanotype, soil and earthy black tea coalesce in layers on paper - lands and waters and creatures of Sunshine Valley forming, changing, receding, shifting, coalescing.  

I make art to remind myself and others to take time to notice; this work invokes the human experience of kairos as well as geologic time. In the making process I welcomed the unexpected and unpredictable. The materials I used, places I worked, and elements present - sun, wind, rain, snow, earth, and my boisterous family were collaborators in an intuitive making process. Rural living, archeology of place and time, the more-than-human,are at the heart of this work. Much of the piece was created outdoors through experiments, and an evolving form of fieldwork exploring both inner and outer landscapes. These material experiments fueled humble curiosity, radical attention and awe. These processes invoke a sense of wonder and a contemplative tone in the work. What does it mean to belong to the land?

Exhitions

“On Which It Rests”, Juried Exhibition, Couse-Sharp Historic Site, Taos, NM July - August, 2024

Images of Inspiration

This Place Has Seen…Sunshine Valley
This place has seen change deep and slow, weather sculpting land, volcanic explosion, lake formation-dissipation. This place has seen legs, felt feet walking, small and large reptiles, mammals - seeking, loving, hunting, homemaking, surviving. This place has seen soft white bellies of birds, wings outstretched, soaring. This place has felt smooth bellies of snakes moving across sun-baked surface. This place has seen grasses dancing, being nibbled, then grazed. This place has felt wooden wheels of wagons leaving tracks. This place has heard sounds of pounding, whoosh of arrows, crack of guns. This place has felt penetration of metal shovels, hoes, planting potatoes, roots reaching down. This place has seen building with mud and wood, homes, barns, a school, a bank. This place has seen collapse - families leaving, wood decomposing, walls melting. This place has felt evolution of human footwear - yucca sandals, leather, rubber, plastic. 
This place sees.
This place feels.

Join me on this photo journey of how this piece about the potency of place came to be. It evolved as my practice grew and changed and took years to come into being…the little laughing Snow Pixie in the video is no longer a toddler!