LINES OF LIGHT artist statement

      In this big ecosystem we call Earth, we are all connected. Imagine the vast and various forms of life that it takes to sustain your physical body, and just as importantly, I would posit, your heart and soul—from sunlight, and clean water, to bees, and flowers, to fruit and trees, to salmon, and rivers, to toothed and baleen whales, to the magnificent oceans, to the things you love! The lists, the lines of life connections, are endless, and they are circular.

     As an artist who also works in conservation and advocacy for endangered species and environments, the concept of interdependence is ever-present in my mind. The foundational concepts and creative inventions that honor biomimicry, looking to the natural world for answers, feels ancient, and wise, and right to me.  When I find myself standing in front of a “blank” birch panel, I see gorgeous patterns in the wood, markers and memories of water and nutrients in soil, and sunlight, and probably pollinators, and certainly things that have died and decomposed.  The lines of life are circular.   The panel is not blank, it is full of stories tucked between lines.  So, in pencil and paint, I have taken to tracing some of those lines, which were born of water and whose shapes remind me of water—water flowing and water lit by patterns of sunlight.  I’ll be honest, the connections, the natural puzzles and patterns revealed through nothing more than a simple act of paying attention—it thrills me.

      For decades, I have incorporated organic, loosely circular shapes in the abstracted patterns of my paintings because they feel elemental, cellular, and universal—such a common part of our visual vernacular we might just miss it in dappled shadows, and tree bark, and stones along a shore, and the barnacle tattoos on whales, and streamline tubercles on the rostrums and fins of humpbacks, and the suckers on an octopus. The circular lines of life are in the microscopic, in visible natural patterns, and in the cycles of life and death, and renewal, and grief, and joy, and love.

     The lines of life are circular.