Visual Art
My visual art emerges through a devotional, exploratory process akin to channeling. Each painting involves many layers, which are often coated by hand in wax (like ritual or healing balm), then distressed (like wounding, the realities of life), then repaired and tended (like healing, ongoing possibility).
My use of natural minerals and pigments and iterative, intuitive patterning speaks to a deep commitment to view humans as nature, and art as a practice of reclaiming our instinctive life force. These are works that embody transformation. They are spells cast, rituals, invocations. They are made in the frequency of what environmental activist Joanna Macy called The Great Turning.
What is “The Great Turning”?
“The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.
The ecological and social crises we face are inflamed by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth. This self-destructing political economy sets its goals and measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits--in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste.
General systems theory, emerging from the life sciences, brings fresh evidence to confirm ancient, indigenous teachings: the Earth is alive, mind is pervasive, all beings are our relations. This realization changes everything. It changes our perceptions of who we are and what we need, and how we can trustfully act together for a decent, noble future.
The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”
—JOANNA MACY