Artistic Approach
At the centre of my practice are the ways that concepts such as nature, wildness, natural resources, and exploration (colonialism, extraction) frame the living world around us and determine how we interact with it. As it continues to become increasingly clear that our thoughts on our environment shape that environment, I look to myriad sources, from European courtly art of centuries past documenting rare and exotic specimens, to depictions of weeds beneath the feet of saints, and illustrated books from the Age of “Discovery” to find the roots and branches of the ideologies that continue to influence current thinking. The ways that nature is represented in scientific images, and the impartiality, objectivity, and authority that is asserted in these types of illustrations is something which I find especially fascinating, troubling, and worthy of deep exploration.
In my practice, technique is reflective of subject matter, and the materiality of my practice is thoroughly entangled with the conceptual aspects of creating. Printmaking, perhaps because of its natural proximity to texts and books, is a medium which easily references its own historical forms, providing a clear pathway to the historical concepts, ideologies, and worldviews that have shaped our current ones. I find that often this temporal distance is helpful in considering that which is immediately before us.
That is to say that…
These days I mostly draw on slabs of Jurassic limestone that were pulled out of the earth more than a century ago and then drawn on by other artists before me. The process of drawing an image into a stone and pulling prints out of it is something which never stops feeling like magic. Working on the bones of the Earth, grinding them smooth or heaving them through an old press, is hard and laborious and slow, engages all of the senses and brings on a physical tiredness, and that is precious.
What is precious too is drawing, observing so closely that the mind quiets, and then arranging and rearranging, referring to artworks and illustrations of other people caught up in other thoughts and other lives before mine. It is a way of thinking about this Earth that we all share and that is changing constantly. That we are changing. This referring back is a way of speaking backwards to other abundances, speaking to how much things have and have not shifted, and to the care, and also to the horrible lack of care, that others have put into thinking about this Earth that has changed and is, at least for those of us living today, eternal.
The making of things is slow and it is like prayer.