statement

I am captivated by sharp edges and contrasts in the natural world, and the slivers of distinct landscape character that they define. Ecological islands and “archipelagos”—whether created by water or some other environmental condition—strike me as downsized, empoweringly “knowable” versions of natural spaces and phenomena (like continent-scale climate patterns, boundless wilderness areas, or massive volcanoes) that we typically think of as overwhelming in scale or force. I heighten this “world-at-my-fingertips” feeling by compressing and structuring these geographies even further in artwork—or, as I prefer to think of it, artistic maps.  

The concept originated in the form of digital photomontages, later reinterpreted in oil paints, piecing together my own travel photographs to invent dramatic ecological juxtapositions. Ultimately it evolved into watercolor paintings—increasingly, accentuations of real-life places—that knit together the ground-level perspectives with aerial views. The watercolors have extended the island theme to include pockets of native ecology in human-dominated landscapes.

I think of these multifaceted compositions as maps because the experience of edges and islands both in representations and in real life is necessarily spatial. It requires zooming out (and “up”), taking in the bigger picture in ways that an individual landscape snapshot cannot—but through multiplying the immersive landscape perspectives (and the geographical relationships between them) rather than through a single, detached aerial view. The maps do each provide an omniscient “view from above it all” but at the same time a “journey through it”—often along particular routes from facet to facet that show up as fragments of paths or roads.

(I have taken a few detours from this approach. My mixed media depictions of imaginary islands and volcanoes, purely aerial watercolor views overlaid with topography represented in plexiglass, are more like traditional, non-immersive maps. On the other hand, my combined musical and visual evocation of a fictional island ascent is more of an immersive journey without the overall view from above.)

I refer to these maps more descriptively as worldviews: they describe complete yet contained and comprehensible “worlds.” The term also refers to my particular way of viewing nature as a series of bounded, contrasting experiences each given its meaning by others beyond. This mindset largely drives my real-world explorations, the creative work they inspire, and my written reflections on both.  

With many of these edges and islands in the real world uniquely vulnerable to climate change and other threats, the maps have also become expressions of ecological preciousness and fragility. My urge to accentuate that “world-at-my-fingertips” feeling has expanded to incorporate an additional impulse—a protective one—to exert control, given that we now literally hold the fate of these special (mini-)worlds in our hands. Even as the edges of the facets appear to sharpen and fix ecological boundaries, the overall fractured structure of the maps (sometimes with a particular shattering quality) creates an undercurrent of instability and disintegration.

But the fracturing could also be interpreted as evoking nature’s inherent, “natural” state of flux (human-caused and not), a dynamism calling into question if natural environments can be considered bounded, “precious,” and “preservable” at all. Whether the fracturing conveys natural environmental change or its unnatural acceleration, the maps suggest a way of visualizing and possibly navigating the tension between the physical reality of ecological impermanence and an imagined “pristine nature,” the latter a cultural construction that is itself no less real.