• MAKE
• WRITE
• TEACH
• LEARN

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Exploration and the literal path less traveled inform my art practice. I vigilantly attend to the natural world at multiple and simultaneous scales as a methodology to examine place and what constitutes my local landscape. My mission is to locate landscapes and inter- actions deemed mapped or known and create alternative geographies that transform how we experience a place. My artwork and research interrogate and re-present the “nature” of marginalized spaces—suburban sprawl, farms, public land.

My practice is transdisciplinary informed by research in geography, environmental studies, forestry, ethnography, agriculture, commu- nity activism and physical computing. My work is a form of critical spatial practice that operates on multiple levels—installations, in- terventions, sculptural objects, performances, writing, pedagogical experiments. I collaborate with graphic designers, musicians, sci- entists, farmers, federal and local forestry agencies, and land use experts such as plants, soil, fungi, insects, and animals. The art- work that emerges from these collaborations invites the audience to visualize, hear, touch, smell, and even taste “data” that might previously seem inaccessible. This research locates the poetic in the landscape, sensually representing abstract ideas that potentially prove valuable to a discussion about nature, what it means to know a place, how to value both the exotic and the familiar equally and increase interest in sustainability and civic engagement.

I employ a variety of tactics to apprehend my surroundings. Ethnographic observation through personal narrative is one of the ways that I relate an experience and establish my role as a participant in the work. Narrative also allows me to engage the audience in a familiar modality providing an entrance into the more abstract aspects of my practice. Listening to the stories of others simultaneously proves critical to my research by providing insight into how people interpret the networks and mappings historically imposed upon both familiar and imagined landscapes.

My research becomes a methodology for “domesticating” data, allowing me to embed my lived experience of place. I comingle the materiality of objects such as card catalogs, canning jars, fire towers, currency, herbarium specimens and substances such as sawdust, sugar, dirt, and seeds with research in botany, ecology, soil sciences, forestry and then using physical computing, imaging technologies, chemistry, and programming to engineer hybrids that reveal relationships previously overlooked. By cultivating alternative modes of categorizing information, my projects seek to create dialogues that produce new opportunities for problem recognition and solving and ultimately, perhaps, have the potential to locate, even celebrate what is singular to a community.

I examine societal issues from the perspective of my lived experience of a particular place with the hope that what makes one place distinctive informs what is significant and valuable about all places. My community is both a resource for the creation of knowledge and scholarship and an opportunity for me to engage with and contribute to where I live. I endeavor to make art that awakens the curiosity for the quotidian in my viewers: transforming spectators into participants yearning to explore their surrounding environments, perhaps developing individual and collective strategies to connect and co-exist with the world around them.