Since 2016 my focus has been to renew and repair my relationship with the natural world. As an artist and truth-teller I want to understand how we can best respond to our changing climate without being immobilized by despair.
The portfolio case was designed and fabricated in collaboration with Jules Remedios Faye.
These are boxed sets of 40 flash cards, hand set in Century Schoolbook type and letterpress printed on heavy card stock at Stern & Faye Printers in an edition of 20. The words are those eliminated from the 21st century editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary for children aged 7-11.
This accordion book, bound in baseball stitch by Arisa Brown, records my recent residency at the Bloedel Reserve where I made daily drawings of botanicals found on walks and faced my grief over climate change.
Each day’s drawing is accompanied by relevant passages from that day’s reading. Fellow artist Sarah Jones was a co-resident at the Bloedel.
This series of idiosyncratic herbarium sheets records useful plants found within a 5 block radius of my home. Each herbarium sheet includes a botanical specimen, dried and mounted in the traditional ways.
In a time of climate uncertainty, an archive of personal interaction with these plants has deepened my awareness of fellow life forms and serves as an antidote to despair.
The 15 plants in this herbarium reside in a beautiful box built by Jules Remedios Faye.
Grieving the slow death of my beloved birch tree, I began to record the seasonal arrival of those plants that persist by stitching them onto a ribbon with which to bind my broken heart.
detail
This is the first in a series of three works that show the root systems of plants known to be effective in phytoremediation. The toxins these plants can eliminate are listed in the background.
They are hand stitched original botanical drawings on tea dyed fabric. The other works in the series depict alfalfa and rye grass root systems. These works are 22” square.