Mantra: My work is for the nurturing and refinement of wild roots. I value a personal engagement with material reality, and the act of channeling its wildness into form. I structure my language with growth and entanglement, adopting the rhythms of tide and season. My respiration exceeds me, as do my tears and salivation.

Statement:

Wild clay, as a verb, centralizes devotion and acts of healing. The body of clay holds memory, in both form and composition. The forest offers bountiful gifts to all who pause to listen and gather their thoughts. In the forest I meditate on gratitude and plasticity. I am mindful of my body as a fluid organism in flow with the depths of geology and time, experiencing growth and decay without end. Through these themes I seek the edges of wildness, just beyond the containment of cognitive structure. In the space of contrast between Expressionism and Post-Minimal sculpture, I channel collective psychological conditions into specific materials of land-based resources: How does Expressionism function to expand the boundaries of the self? How does ecological despair manifest in the materiality of place? In what ways does confronting these emotions as a population contribute toward a leveling of anthropocentric hierarchies? My process seeks methods of healing the cultural traumas of Late-Capitalism that disrupt humanity’s innate reciprocity with our nonhuman counterparts. 

I trust in the symmetry of a relationship, that an offering of love, time, and attention will foster conditions for growth. Spirituality is one word to express an act of communion with an expanded being, and other disciplines also recognize this need. It’s part of Maslow’s hierarchy, and it’s the premise for organizing all types of social order. Belonging to the Earth as an intra-planetary being, as a way to reclaim a sovereign relationship with the planet, in the sense of responsibility, of care, in its fundamental persistence, and in resistance to Anthropocentric ecocide, fulfills this need when national and global identities fail. To quote Merlin Sheldrake in an exploration of mycorrhizal language networks: “What would it look like to consume a rotting ecocidal ideology? How could we decompose that in our minds and our communities? And what could fruit on the other side”. I follow the decompositional ideologies of Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s “Geontologies” to redefine the hierarchies of Life and Nonlife, Jason Hickel’s policies of economic degrowth, which decouples GDP from social well-being, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Honorable Harvest for resource reciprocity. In the path of these theorists, I practice a generative resistance that centralizes healing encounters with Earth

Intentions: To found a co-op with artists who explore Geopoetics ~ a fluid-hierarchical language system for reintegrating Earth into the human psyche. Geopoetics is a form of Realism that scales the human experience against a geological timeline. Amidst this decentralized planetary space, we reveal the entanglements between Earth systems and inhabitants, often featuring the global reverberations of human activity. Geopoetics is an exploration of relational language for subverting an inter-species power dynamic privileging human point of view, ie Human Exceptionalism. By bringing description to these relational processes, we offer agency to all Earth characters and further our understanding of the infinitely complex systems perpetuating beyond our scope. My art practice has become a task of both structuring and also wilding my relationship to the land in a way that nourishes those who venture through.