Artist’s Statement

January 2026

My work uses sound and smell in addition to visual art in order to link the experience of the individual to the collective systems and rhythms of the larger world. Birth, growth, expansion and decay are transformative and constant events of animal, mineral, non-human and human ecologies, which carry on regardless of human political and social constructions. I look for the places where the borders between these systems collapse as a way to connect.

This work is an offering, a suggestion, of how these systems are interrelated, and how we as individuals and as humans are simply one part of the whole. There is a world that exists prior to us. The sounds in the story work to create a sense of blending and absorption. Our bodily experiences of hearing, touching and smelling are encountered individually. These senses in particular are also ways of encountering the world in an unbounded, collective manner that spreads out beyond the social/cultural frame. There is an inseparability of maker, picture and what is pictured, hinting at a universal language that goes beyond the mirror, the map or the eye. The viewer of this image is as involved as the maker.

Possible sounds to include are of the Atlantic mid ocean, waves on a beach in Japan, owls in the San Francisco Bay Area, voices speaking, buoys in the fog, traffic, rain and coyotes in Georgia. Scents and smells are shared sensory markers.

The sounds may be slowed down, speeded up or repeated during the piece. Bits or fragments of musical chords and beats may join and enhance the emotional effect to be experienced. Relationships between the human heartbeat, the rhythm of walking, crickets at night and airplanes overhead surface in order to remind us that there is no separation of figure from ground. Repetition strengthens these relationships.