"The paintings in Constellations I drew in Nevada emerged from drawings I made of the night sky during an artist residency in the Great Basin Desert (in rural Nevada) in 2019.

I did not have access to the internet or phone service, so the clusters I drew were stars I imagined to be in relation to one another, rather than mythological or historical groupings.  Everywhere in the Great Basin is a scattering of stone, of petrified wood, of bleached animal bones.

The sculptures of stone and glass throughout this exhibition relate to the desert ground, the paintings to the night sky.The following is a diary entry from that time:  August 29th, 2020, The Montello Foundation, NevadaQuite an eventful night last night.  A windstorm blew though this stretch of basin rattling the house and making a significant racket.  The anxiety of the night made me quite sure it would blow the wildfires right to my door.  But it the morning, everything was as it was.  This morning, virga, all around.

I can’t remember- is sepulcher the smell of rain before it comes?  I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty, what it is, how it translates into physical form.  I feel most beautiful when I soften, let go of expectations, let go of the rigid boundary between myself and the world.  The most beautiful things, I believe, can appear to be ugly with only a short twist of light.  I think this is because they are a responsive to, intertwined with the world they breath in.  In the desert one’s boundaries dissolve.  Loneliness is not so much of an issue because one becomes also dust, also light.  Everything passes through you all the time.  High altitude deserts near mountains- this is my home.

How can I construct a life where I can always come back here?  Here, I confuse my heartbeat with the sound of an approaching truck.  I collect rocks and they slip through my overladen hands- everywhere a treasure.   The counters of mountains are like the curves and dips of a body- the grasses droop and leave semi-circle drawings when the wind blows them.  A desert of brutality is not the desert that I have known.  Yesterday, I saw a square rainbow held in a pocket of a cloud.  I made dye from juniper berries and an old mordant recipe using juniper needle ash.  I sat with what I didn’t know.  I drew constellations in the sky and looked for their counterparts in the holes dug by insects and animals in the ground.

I find myself more and more trusting the land, listening to the wind.  I rub sage between my hands and breath in.  The words from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley play over and over again in my head- “the desert has mothered magical things”.  When I dream, I dream of people When I dream, I dream of people I have known."

Thus clay, so lately no more than a crude and formless substance, ‍was metamorphosed to assume the strange new figure of  Man.‍

"The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on.  Ignorance is the ground of thought.  Unproof is the ground of action.  If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion…. But also if it were proven that there is a God there would be no religion…Tell me Genry, what is known?

‍I’d like to learn how to tell you your future in a way that does not deny your flexibility.

I love Ovid’s Metamorphoses- one story of change flowing to another- because I feel viscerally the looseness of the threads holding together our current forms.

Such as: I am a woman, now I am a spider, now a myth.

‍If Lucretius’s world is composed of unalterable atom’s, Ovid’s is composed of the qualities, attributes, and forms that reveal the distinctiveness of every object, and plant and animal and person but that are merely thin sheaths over a common substance which--- when stirred by profound emotion can change itself into radically different forms.

‍I work with wool, silk, metal, and dye because I’m interested in the fluidity (live-ness) of these materials.
The wool in my pieces is handspun, woven, boiled, and beaten.  Touch, labor, and the imprint of my body becomes as present as possible.
This exhibition includes both stretched and un-stretched works, all walking the line between painting and textile. I see the relationship between my stretched and free-hanging works as similar to how I understand stillness against motion, silence next to sound.  Separate entities, yet capable of forming a rhythm (relationship) when sharing space.  Oracles also includes a multipiece installation of stones, some gathered, some cast from steel.  At its core, my practice is rooted in exploring transformation- how fostering attention to shift can be not only a creative practice, but also a spiritual, even a devotional one.

To cast the dice when the future is a moving target. What is divination in the face of unrelenting transformation?  If nothing is fixed, then known and unknown.  At what point do we give up any distinction?

‍None of the elements kept their shape, and all were in conflict inside one body: the cold with the hot, the wet with the dry, the soft with the hard, and the weight with the weightless.Like before we were born, or inside a black hole, or within a moment of extreme exhaustion.

‍Stones into steel.  Fleece into fabric.  What am I in this instant? I’m a typewriter making the dry echo in the dark, humid dawn.