The Word For World Is Forest
Like other speculative feminists, Le Guin critiques the teleology of interstellar imperialism as a killer story. In response, my works offer visual speculations of life stories throughout the cosmos.
I scrape through layered paint to reveal previous encounters. These organic marks generate tense, dynamic and thriving landscapes. What practices enable their fragile and continued existence? What dialectic about environmental futurity is imagined?
On Life in Ruins…
Forest fires have come to signify a climate in crisis. Yet historically, forest and fire have long, entangled and even productive relationships. In the mid-20th century, technologies like clear-cutting replaced (and erased) Native American fire regimes in the US. Attempts to master nature were further enshrined by national narratives - like those of the vigilant and virile Smokey Bear. As Ursula K. Le Guin notes, the teleology of patriarchal heroism is a killer story - and leaves an absence in which life stories must be told.
Life in Ruins speculates on a life story of forest and fire, and more broadly, human and nature interrelations. I layer water and paint in colors and patterns that resemble fire-swept forests, where dead brush and new growth thrive in contingency. As death melts into life (and vice versa), bright vulnerable shapes balance and dance. In the space(s) between loss and growth, what kinds of life and ways of living unfold? What ways of unknowing and knowing emerge?
Small Abstract Works
A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
to light that’s blazing
inside your presence.Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.
RUMI, “STORY WATER”
